No autograph copy of this poem is known. It is here reproduced from the letter written to the Norcross cousins in mid-July 1871, and printed as prose.

PUBLICATION: Letters (ed. 1894), 266; (ed. 1931), 243; also LL (1924), 279. The text from the same source is in New England Quarterly, XX (1947), 45, arranged as two quatrains. The last two words of line 5 are arranged as the sixth line. In the published letter the first word only is capitalized.