Page:America's National Game (1911).djvu/486

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454
AMERICA'S NATIONAL GAME

him if he would like to meet the man who wrote 'Casey at the Bat.' Hopper accepted the invitation gladly and the next day was presented to Ernest L. Thayer, of Worcester. Thayer admitted the authorship and told the circumstances which led up to the penning of the verses."

Another poem, of equal literary merit, a parody on Macaulay's "Lays of Ancient Rome," which appeared about the same time, and which is supposed to have first been printed in the St. Louis Globe-Democrat, seems to have been lost to literature, unless this reference to it shall result in its reproduction. I have been unable to secure a copy, but a friend recalls the opening stanza, in these words:

"Ho, lictors, sound the war note;
Triumvirs, clear the way;
The great barbarian ball teams
Will play in Rome to-day."


The reference, of course, is to the World's Tour of the Chicago and All-America teams, in 1888-9.

It will be manifestly impossible to reproduce here a tithe of the meritorious verse that has been written on our national game. From a collection of many poems the following are selected as representing the wide range over which the Base Ball Pegasus has roamed:

THE SPORTSMAN'S CODE.

From Harper's Round Table.

Now these are the laws of the athlete,
That stretch the length of the field.
They make the code of the runner fleet
Who has never yet learned to yield.
They tell you how to lay your plan.
And how to carry it through.
They help the man, who's done what he can,
To bear his Waterloo.