Page:Famous Single Poems (1924).djvu/57

 waifs and strays usually grouped together at the back of anthologies and marked "Unidentified." The Reverend Dr. Dryer speaks of his high poetic gifts. Perhaps in Scotland there still may be some poems associated with his name; in America there is only one.

The city editor of the Herald turned to Rose one day in 1897, after one of the characteristic outbursts of the German Emperor, and said, "Gordon, give us some verses about the Kaiser." An hour later Rose turned in a set of sixteen stanzas entitled "Kaiser & Co." They were published the same day, but through some mistake on the part of the make-up man, only half of them appeared in the first edition of the paper. Rose noticed the mistake and in the later editions the complete poem appeared, but it was the first edition which got into the mails, and so, when the poem was copied by other papers, it was only eight stanzas long. The version which accompanies this article is the complete poem, as Rose wrote it.

While copied here and there, laughed over a little, and eventually re-christened "Hoch! der Kaiser," the poem created no great sensation and might even have dropped out of sight, as so many other fugitive poems have done, but for the sudden shove into the limelight which Captain Coghlan gave it two years after it was written.