oud?" He says:

I have not your letter now before me; but from memory, I think you
ask me who is the author of the piece I sent you, and that you do
so ask as to indicate a slight suspicion that I am the author.
Beyond all question, I am not the author. I would give all I am
worth, and go in debt, to be able to write so fine a piece as I
think that is. I met it in a straggling newspaper last summer, and
I remember to have seen it once before, about fifteen years ago,
and this is all I know about it.

The statement that he first had seen the poem about fifteen years before
1846--that is, about 1831--carries his acquaintance with it back to the
period of his friendship for Ann Rutledge, and it is not at all
improbable that she learned it at the same time.

After Lincoln had become President, he is said to have made one or more
copies of this poem for personal friends; but I have not seen any of
these copies. It would be interesting to know whether he ever knew the
whole poem.

Literary critics have not shared his high estimate of the composition.
In general they have esteemed it a rather mediocre piece. But its
rhythm is accurate, and its rhyme is good, and its plaintive sentiment
accorded with the melancholy of Lincoln and of his social environment.
It is not the only poem of no great literary merit which became popular
in that period; and it would have been forgotten with the rest but for
the association of its lines with the name of Abraham Lincoln. He gave
to it and its author their chief claim to immortality.

During his Presidency, Lincoln said:

There is a poem which has been a great favorite with me for years,
which was first shown me when a young man, by a friend, and which I
afterwards saw and cut from a newspaper and learned by heart. I
would give a good deal to know who wrote it, but I have never been
able to ascertain.

The author of the poem, "Oh, why should the spirit of mortal be proud?"
was William Knox, who was born at Firth, in the parish of Lilliesleaf,
in the county of Roxburghshire, in Scotland, on the 17th of August,
1789, and who died at the age of thirty-six. From his early childhood
he wrote verses, and he attained sufficient prominence to win the
attention of Walter Scott, who encouraged him and loaned him money. What
he might have done had he lived, we do not know; but this is the only
poem of his that has any claim to dis