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FAMOUS SONGS
when he was merely Mr. R. Monckton Milnes. At the time of writing this lyric, Monckton Milnes, who had a well-deserved reputation as a maker of light, tuneful verse, was the guest of some friends in the country, and while a party of them went out riding and driving, the clever young poet elected to wander about by himself in the beautiful solitude of a summer day. The silence was intense, and only broken, as he said, by the beating of his own heart and the gentle murmur of a running stream near which he strayed. The phrase " the beating of my own heart" kept singing in his ear, and there and then he wrote the simple song which was destined, by the aid of Sir (then Professor) .George A. Macfarren's melody, to become so famous. On his return to the house he told his hostess what he had written, and at her request he read his poem to the assembled guests at the dinner table. Strange to say, nobody thought anything of the piece, and they mostly criticised it rather severely. However, Monckton Milnes had faith in his own effort, and though his friends declared that the lines " The beating of my own heart was all the sound I heard" were nonsense, as no man could hear his own heart beat (which, of course, he can, under certain conditions), he was able to prove his own contention right, for
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