Page:Famous Single Poems (1924).djvu/69

 New York City, published his collected poems, and one of them was "A Visit from St. Nicholas."

This apparently settled the question, and from that time forward the poem has always been ascribed to him. Griswold in his Poets and Poetry of America, published in 1849, is said to have so credited it (though the poem has been replaced by another one by Dr. Moore, possibly at his own suggestion, in the 1852 edition of that work owned by the present writer); it is so credited in Duyckinck's Cyclopedia of American Literature, published in 1855; and there has been no question concerning its authorship in the mind of any subsequent anthologist. Indeed such a question would have seemed preposterous.

Accompanying the verses in Duyckinck is a very complimentary note about Dr. Moore, from which the following is taken:

Professor Moore has lightened his learned labors in the seminary by the composition of numerous poems from time to time, chiefly expressions of home thoughts and affections, with a turn for humor as well as sentiment, the reflections of a genial, amiable nature. They were collected by the author in a volume in 1844, which he dedicated to his children. Though occasional compositions, they are polished in style, the author declaring in his preface that he does not pay his readers "so ill a compliment as to offer