Page:Famous Single Poems (1924).djvu/50

 The above facts have been gleaned from the public press. A letter to the Navy Department, asking for some information about the incident, brought the following remarkable response:

Sic transit! Or perhaps Captain Coghlan was not reprimanded, after all!

But neither Wilhelm II, nor the German Ambassador, nor Secretary Hay, nor the Navy Department, nor all of them combined could suppress "Hoch! der Kaiser." That masterpiece had been lifted suddenly into immortality. It had found a fit interpreter at a supremely fit moment, and its fame was secure. Yet nobody knew the name of its author, or where it had first appeared. It was just one of those fugitive poems, those nameless orphans, which drift through the columns of the press, their origin shrouded in mystery, and which gradually fade from sight unless preserved for posterity by some such accident as had befallen this one.