“Good-night, here’s the end of my paper,
Good-night, if the longitude please:
For, perhaps, while I’m wasting my taper,
Your sun’s climbing over the trees.”
It is a little difficult to imagine how it could be sunrise in California at the conclusion of an evening party in New York, even though the dancers had prolonged their amusement until compelled to “chase the glowing hours with flying feet.” And, furthermore, this is improbable because the writer is represented as writing by artificial light. Evidently “Old Folinsbee’s Daughter” had had more training in sentiment than in astronomy.
Wolseley’s Mistake
Lord Wolseley ends his “Decline and Fall of Napoleon” with the following words:
“So wrote the finger on the wall about the proud King of Babylon. It might with equal truth have been written of him whose overthrow at Waterloo is thus described in verse:
“‘Since he miscalled the morning star,
Nor man nor fiend hath fallen so far.’”