Poems for Pale People / A Volume of Verse

Even serious old Longfellow had this feeling in his bones when he wrote the immortal lines which all of us recall from childhood:
"There was a little girl
And she had a little curl
Which hung way down on her forehead;
And when she was good,
She was very good indeed,
But when she was bad, she was horrid."
This is nonsense pure and simple and even the most ardent admirers of Mr. Longfellow must, when they try to make "forehead" and "horrid" rhyme, admit that it was very poor verse for the author of "Evangeline."
Bret Harte flew off at a tangent when he wrote about "Ah Sin, The Chinaman," a nonsense poem that gave "Bill Nye" his pseudonym. Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote "The Wonderful One-Hoss Shay." Rudyard Kipling is often "caught with the goods on him" and Mark Twain wrote an "Ode to Stephen Dowling Botts."