ST. PATRICK’S HALL.
“It is a curious thing,” continued Mrs. Henniker, “that one or two of my father’s poems, which were thought least of at the time, have really become the most popular and the best known. There is a story concerning one of them which he often used to tell. He was visiting some friends here in Ireland, and the beat of the horses’ feet upon the road as he drove to the house seemed to hammer out in his head certain rhythmical ideas which quickly formed themselves into rhyme. As soon as he got to the house he went to his room and wrote the words straight out. It was the well-known song beginning—
“’I wandered by the brookside,’
And having the refrain—
“’But the beating of my own heart
Was all the sound I heard.’
“When he came down to dinner he showed these verses to his friends. They all declared that they were unworthy of him, and advised him to throw them into the fire. However, he did not take their advice; the moment they were published, they caught the ear of the public, they were set to music, and they were to be heard wherever one went. Indeed, a friend of his who was sailing down a river in the Southern States of North America, about a year afterwards, heard the slaves, as they hoed in the plantations, keeping time by singing a parody of the lines which had by then become universally familiar. And one day, in later years, my father was walking in London with a friend; they were passing the end of a street when they heard a man singing—he stopped and listened, and then rushed after the man. He came back a few moments afterwards, bearing a roughly printed paper in his hands.”
RICHARD MONCKTON MILNES, FIRST LORD HOUGHTON.
“’I knew it was my song that he was singing,’” he said, and he was perfectly right. He was much delighted.
“’It’s a curious fact,’ observed the Lord Lieutenant to me, ’and one which Wemyss Reid specially notes in his biography, that my father produced the greater part of his poetry between 1830 and 1840, just when he was going most into Society.’”