Page:Famous Single Poems (1924).djvu/26

 For the lines which are cut on his gravestone form the first stanza of a poem called “There Is No Death”—a poem which has been reprinted in newspapers all over the English-speaking world, in hymn books and song books and school readers, in countless collections of verse, in legislative reports, and even in the Congressional Record—credited almost everywhere to Edward Robert Lytton Bulwer, first Earl of Lytton, otherwise Owen Meredith!

Now at first thought it may seem to be of no great moment who wrote “There Is No Death.” If Bulwer wrote it, it belongs to English literature; if McCreery wrote it, it belongs to American literature; but it may be pointed out with perfect justice that it enriches neither very much. Its importance, however, lies not in its poetic content, but in its wide popularity, for it is one of those semi-religious, semi-didactic, quasi-mystical, pensively sentimental poems which find their way straight to unsophisticated hearts; the sort of poem which orators on the Chautauqua circuit love to spout, and literary societies of Gopher Prairie to recite, and obituary writers of the country press to quote. It is, in short, one of those poems which are familiar to a far wider public than anything by Browning or by Keats. And, after all, however the judicious may grieve and the clever may sneer, that is fame!