128 MR. WILDE S POEM. [CHAP, xxvin. 



with that of many Romans in regard to the malaria 

 of Italy. 



The year following this conversation, our excellent 

 friend was himself carried off by this fatal disease. 

 He is well known to the literary world as the author 

 of a work on the &quot; Love and Madness of Tasso,&quot; 

 published in 1842, and perhaps still more generally 

 by some beautiful lines, beginning &quot; My life is like 

 the summer rose,&quot; which are usually supposed to have 

 derived their tone of touching melancholy, from his 

 grief at the sudden death of a brother, and soon after 

 of a mother, who never recovered the shock of her 

 son s death. As there had been so much controversy 

 about this short poem, we asked Mr. Wilde to relate 

 to us its true history, which is curious. He had 

 been one of a party at Savannah, when the question 

 was raised whether a certain professor of the Univer 

 sity of Georgia understood Greek ; on which one of 

 his companions undertook to translate Mr. Wilde s 

 verses, called &quot; The Complaint of the Captive,&quot; into 

 Greek prose, so arranged as to appear like verse, and 

 then see if he could pass it off upon the Professor as 

 a fragment of Alcasus. The trick succeeded, al 

 though the Professor said that not having the works 

 of Alcaeus at hand, he could not feel sure that the poem 

 was really his. It was then sent, without the know 

 ledge of Mr. Wilde and his friends, to a periodical at 

 New York, and published as a fragment from Alca3us, 

 and the Senator for Georgia was vehemently attacked 

 by his political opponents, for having passed off a 

 translation from the Greek as an original composition 

 of his own. 



