Note 641:1 — FAMILIAR QUOTATIONS. (continued 10)
Reading edition
This quatrain appears with variations in several stanzas. "The poem," says Mr. Rossiter Johnson in "Famous Single and Fugitive Poems," "is persistently attributed to Alfred Domett; but in a letter to me, Feb. 6, 1879, he says: 'I did not write that poem, and was never in India in my life. I am as ignorant of the authorship as you can be.'"