# Famous Single Poems/The Lesson of the Water-Mill

THE LESSON OF THE WATER-MILL
Listen to the water-mill; Through the livelong day, How the clicking of its wheel Wears the hours away! Languidly the autumn wind, Stirs the forest leaves, From the field the reapers sing, Binding up their sheaves; And a proverb haunts my mind As a spell is cast— “The mill cannot grind With the water that is past.”
Autumn winds revive no more Leaves that once are shed, And the sickle cannot reap Corn once gatherèd; Flows the ruffled streamlet on, Tranquil, deep, and still; Never gliding back again To the water-mill; Truly speaks the proverb old With a meaning vast— “The mill cannot grind With the water that is past.”
Take the lesson to thyself, True and loving heart; Golden youth is fleeting by, Summer hours depart; Learn to make the most of life, Lose no happy day; Time will never bring thee back Chances swept away! Leave no tender word unsaid, Love while love shall last — “The mill cannot grind With the water that is past.”
Work while yet the daylight shines, Man of strength and will! Never does the streamlet glide Useless by the mill; Wait not till to-morrow’s sun Beams upon thy way, All that thou canst call thine own Lies in thy “To-day;” Power, intellect and health May not always last— “The mill cannot grind With the water that is past.”
Oh, the wasted hours of life That have drifted by! Oh, the good that might have been— Lost, without a sigh!
Love that we might once have saved By a single word, Thoughts conceived, but never penned, Perishing unheard;— Take the proverb to thine heart, Take, and hold it fast— “The mill cannot grind With the water that is past.”
Sarah Doudney.
THE LESSON OF THE WATER-MILL
It is usually the despair of single-poem men that their fame rests upon what seems to most of them so slender a foundation, and nearly all of them disclose a curious blind spot when it comes to looking at their own work, so that, just as a parent will often love his unworthiest child the best, the poet almost always thinks many of his creations are far superior to the one the public prefers, and is inclined to feel abused when they are disregarded.
“In general quality,” writes Mr. Ernest Lawrence Thayer, “‘Casey at the Bat,’ at least in my judgment, is neither better nor worse than much of my other stuff.” Mr. Charles M. Dickinson, the author of “The Children,” voices the same feeling.
“The anthologies,” he writes, “seem determined that I shall go down to posterity as the author of a single poem. Now I plan to let the collectors know that I have written other verse. So I am sending you a book containing some of my other poems with the hope that you may find something in it worth copying beside ‘The Children.’”
​The book was examined with the best will in the world, but “The Children” remained the only poem quoted from it. The other verses were graceful, sincere, and not without poetic merit, but they lacked that quality of universal appeal which is really what has won “The Children” a place in so many anthologies. Mr. Dickinson, indeed, has some reason to be grateful to anthologists, for they have made it plain that it was he who wrote the poem, and not Charles Dickens, as some too-enthusiastic exchange editors were at one time trying to make the public believe.
So with Mr. Thayer. The anthologists have defended him valiantly against the attacks of various claimants of the authorship of “Casey at the Bat,” but that remains the only poem of his which is ever quoted. His other ballads lack that touch of genius which has made “Casey” the great classic of baseball.
Many writers of verse have had another reason to despair: they were constantly receiving requests for permission for the use of certain of their poems, they saw them quoted everywhere and apparently widely popular, yet their own books, in which these poems appeared, never sold enough to keep them in postage-stamps. It is not strange that, in course of time, they should feel a resentment against all compilers, as men who were robbing them of their just reward. ​A most interesting letter dealing with this question—interesting because so entirely frank—was written by Mrs. Elizabeth Akers Allen a year or two before her death.
“My publishers tell me that nobody buys books of poems in these days,” Mrs. Allen writes, “so I have no courage to offer another volume. As most of the publishing houses seem to have changed into mere job-printing offices, publishing nothing for which they are not paid in advance, or which they cannot pick up for nothing, there seems small encouragement for verse-writers who are not prepared to hire their books printed. Considering these things, I do wonder who buys all the compilations of verse which every year brings out, if it is true that ‘nobody reads poetry.’
“Another thing puzzles me. When I know that the scholarly and experienced Professor Lowell never declined a poem of mine while he edited the Atlantic, and that Longfellow, Bryant, Whittier, Underwood, Stedman, and many lesser lights of the literary world here and in England, have included my work in their selections, when I have over sixty sheets of music which have been written by composers (utter strangers to me) to words of mine which they have either taken from my books or have picked out of newspaper columns and appropriated without my knowledge, and when I am ​told that some of these songs are sung all over the English-speaking world, I cannot help wondering how it is that my books have not paid me enough to keep me supplied with stationery. If I had depended upon my verse for even the plainest living, I should have starved long ago. It is fortunate that ‘poetry is its own reward,’ for I judge that only the more fortunate bards find any other.”
The defense of anthologists will not be undertaken here. It may be pointed out, however, that they are by no means the plutocrats Mrs. Allen supposed, and of late years they have as a class renounced piracy and become almost respectable. Poets are their debtors for two things: it is they who keep alive the single lovely songs which would be lost and forgotten in a mass of “collected works,” and they are indefatigable in running down questions of authorship and in making sure that the person who wrote the poem gets the credit for it—as Mrs. Allen herself had reason to know during the violent controversy which raged in the ’60s and ’70s about the authorship of “Rock Me to Sleep.”
Another dispute, resembling in many ways the famous one between Mrs. Allen and Mr. Ball, and involving the reputation of one of the most distinguished men of Civil War days, still starts occasionally on a fresh round of the ​press. It was Partridge who remarked sadly of hunger that, no matter how often one subdues it, it always bobs up again; and this is equally true of literary controversies.
Every once in a while somebody happens upon a small volume published privately in Brooklyn in 1870, entitled The Water-Mill, and Other Poems, by D. C. McCallum, and writes triumphantly to the papers that here at last is the solution of a famous mystery. The late Dr. Washington Gladden was one of these persons, and the letter which he wrote to the Ohio State Journal in the fall of 1915, is so typical that it is worth quoting:
You published this morning a little poem on “The Water That Has Passed,” marking it, “Author Unknown.”
Permit me to remove the veil of anonymity. The author was D. C. McCallum, a resident, when this poem was written, of my old home town, Owego, Tioga County, New York. Mr. McCallum, when I first knew him, was superintendent of the Susquehanna division of the Erie Railroad; afterward he was in charge of all the bridge building on that road, and I am not sure that he was not at one time president. He was also, I think, called into the service of the government early in the Civil War. I believe that we learned to call him “General.”
He was a fine, soldierly appearing man, very ​quiet and domestic in his tastes, and greatly respected by all his neighbors. His children were my schoolmates.
A few days later, a letter from Mr. Gregg D. Wolfe called Dr. Gladden’s attention to the fact that “The Water That Has Passed” was written, not by General McCallum, but by Sarah Doudney, and when this was proved to Dr. Gladden’s satisfaction, he hazarded the guess that a copy of the poem had been found among General McCallum’s papers and mistakenly attributed to him in consequence, since it was incredible that so distinguished and respected a man would ever pose as the author of a poem which was not his.
It is, alas, impossible to place so charitable a construction upon the matter, for there the poem is in the book which General McCallum himself incautiously published. But before going into that, his career may be outlined in a few words.
Daniel Craig McCallum was born at Johnston, Renfrewshire, Scotland, January 21, ​1815, and died in Brooklyn, New York, December 27, 1878. He came to America in his youth, became an architect and builder, and in 1855 was general superintendent of the Erie Railway. On February 11, 1862, he was appointed director of all the military railroads in the United States, with the staff rank of colonel, and served in that position throughout the Civil War. He seems to have been a thoroughly competent executive, his work was always referred to in the highest terms, and to him was credited in large part the efficiency which the northern railroads attained during the great struggle. He was mustered out of the service in 1866 with the rank of major-general of volunteers.
General McCallum seems to have had a fondness throughout his life, and especially in his later years, for writing verses of a moralistic character and in 1870, as has been said, gathered some of them together in a book dedicated “To My Dearest Friend.” There were twenty-five poems altogether, the first being “The Water-Mill.” The nature of the others may be judged from such titles as “The Creed of Life,” “A Warning Voice,” “The Madman’s Reverie,” "Be Kind to the Erring,” and “All, All Alone.” They are tinged with pious melancholy, abound in frightful visions, and their quality may be judged very fairly by these two ​stanzas from “An O’er True Tale,” which is concerned with woman’s inhumanity to woman:
See yon pale form, in garret high— Wearily stitching, on and on; Oh! listen to the deep, low sigh! Ah! it should melt a heart of stone.
Her face—once fair, of Grecian mold— Now pale and wan with carking care; Her eyes were bright, she once was told; What is she now? a case not rare.
The first stanza of the poem which gives the book its title is as follows:
Oh! listen to the Water-Mill, through all the livelong day, As the clicking of the wheel, wears hour by hour away; How languidly the Autumn wind, doth stir the withered leaves, As on the field the Reaper’s sing, while binding up the sheaves, A solemn proverb strikes my mind, and as a spell is cast, “The mill will never grind, with water that is past.”
Nobody seems to have doubted that this poem was entirely original with General McCallum, and the discovery that it was not came about entirely by chance. Some years subsequently, ​the late Irving Bishop, the thought-reader, while visiting in London, happened upon a little volume of poems by Sarah Doudney. Among them he found “The Water-Mill,” and at once accused Miss Doudney of stealing General McCallum’s poem. The matter was immediately taken up by a friend of Miss Doudney, Mr. William Isbister, of Isbister & Company, the publishers of Good Words, and a meeting was arranged at which Mr. Bishop and Miss Doudney were present.
“A copy of the Churchman’s Family Magazine, containing ‘The Lesson of the Water-Mill,’ with an illustration, was shown to Mr. Bishop,” Miss Doudney writes, “and he quite satisfied himself that I had written the poem before Mr. McCallum’s lines appeared. But we could never explain the course which Mr. McCallum followed in appropriating and altering my poem.
“The Churchman’s Family Magazine was edited by the Rev. Frederick Arnold,” Miss Doudney continues. “The volume in which my poem appeared was kept by me for a long time, but was afterwards sold among other books. However the proofs of authorship are doubtless retained by Mr. Isbister.
“We have never been able to ascertain the origin of the proverb, but have heard that it is Italian. I saw it first in a child’s scrap-book ​under a picture of a water-mill. The words were these: ‘The mill cannot grind with the water that is past.’
“For a long time,” Miss Doudney concludes, “I believed my claim was firmly established, but two or three years ago I had to defend myself against a spiteful attack in Mr. O’Connor’s paper—the charge of being a deceiver was brought against me quite unexpectedly, in a most insulting manner. With respect to Mr. McCallum, I think it is likely that he did not intend the verses he wrote as an improved version of mine to appear in public. However, in literary matters some people appear to have no conscience at all.”
There is a legend that Miss Doudney, who was born in 1843, wrote the poem at the age of fifteen; however this is probably just an invention, since it was not until 1864 that the poem appeared in the Churchman’s Family Magazine. The editor of that paper, Mr. J. A. Kensit, was asked if he could refer to the files and get the exact date, but answered that this was impossible. However, even in the absence of all other proof, the presumption would be altogether in favor of Miss Doudney. She passed the early years of her life in a remote village in Hampshire, England, to which it is altogether unlikely that any copy of General McCallum’s privately printed volume ​would ever penetrate. On the other hand, her verses were printed in The Sunday Magazine, Good Words, and The Churchman’s Family Magazine, and were widely read and copied in America as well as in England.
“The Lesson of the Water-Mill” was especially well-known for, besides being often reprinted, it was for many years a favorite recitation. Strangely enough, as a recitation it was usually given in German dialect, which was supposed to add to its pathos, and with a musical accompaniment (preferably on the ’cello) to enhance the general effect. It was so recited by George S. Knight in a comedy called “Fifth Avenue,” produced at the old Booth Theatre in New York in the early ’seventies. Mr. Henry S. Blake, of Clinton, Conn., who has himself recited the poem hundreds of times during the past thirty-five years, possesses an old stage copy with the musical accompaniment used by Mel. B. Spurr, an English entertainer, published by Reynolds & Co., 13 Berners Street, London. This gives the author’s name on the cover as Sarah Doudney, and at the foot of the first page is the line, “By permission, from Psalms of Life, by Miss Sarah Doudney.”
Still further proof, if any were needed, is found in the poem itself. It is evident that Miss Doudney’s version is the first one; it is simple and direct. What General McCallum ​tried to do was to elaborate and polish it up, to make it more flowing; but a comparison of his first stanza, as given above, with Miss Doudney’s version will show that his changes were all for the worse. His punctuation, moreover, is that of a man who, if not exactly illiterate, was at least quite unskilled in writing. His “Reaper’s sing” is a mistake which no one with any knowledge of grammar would make.
But he gave himself away still further, for he not only revised Miss Doudney’s stanzas, but added one of his own, after his usual moralizing way. Here it is—it speaks for itself:
Oh! love thy God and fellow man, thyself consider last, For come it will when thou must scan, dark errors of the past, Soon will this fight of life be o’er, and earth recede from view, And Heaven in all its glory shine, where all is pure and true, Ah! then thou’lt see more clearly still, the proverb deep and vast, “The mill will never grind with water that is past.”
More than once, in the course of these papers, it has been shown what deadly peril the plagiarist runs when he attempts to add a stanza to the poem he has stolen. In General McCallum’s case it is, as usual, fatal! Nobody ​who would write this sort of mush could, by any possibility, write a real poem.
Literary stealings of this sort have given rise to many controversies and to endless heartburnings. Many lives have been embittered by them, and they have often furnished a theme for the moralist. But few denunciations have been so vigorous as an editorial entitled “Literary Larcenies,” published in the New York Evening Gazette of January 3, 1867. This polemic is so characteristic of the controversial style of that epoch, that it is worth quoting, in part at least:
​Some of the most famous lyrics in the language have had their paternity disputed in this way. Among others, Wolfe’s “Burial of Sir John Moore,” upon which a number of imaginative Celts endeavored to father themselves, and Campbell’s “Exile of Erin,” which it is now pretended that he stole bodily, we believe from the traditional exile himself, McCann, if that was his name. They are very active here, and at this time—these barefaced purloiners of reputation—snapping up any little waif that may come under their observation.
Everybody remembers the young person of the softer sex, a Miss Peck, if we recall her name correctly, who said that ’twas she, and not Mr. William Butler, who wrote “Nothing to Wear,” which, of course, she had no means of proving beyond her mere assertion, which nobody was gallant enough to accept. A second instance of disputed authorship was ventilated a few months since in the Round Table, the thing in dispute then being a copy of verses entitled “The Long Ago,” and written by a Mr. Benjamin F. Taylor, of Chicago, who has had all sorts of hands grasping after his imaginary laurel, and rousing, through their friends, a mighty clamor for justice, which they richly deserved in the nearest literary pillory.
To which there is nothing to be added except Amen!