On 28 February 1906, Samuel L. Clemens (Mark Twain) spoke at the Hartford, Conn. funeral of his former coachman, Patrick McAleer. Both the local paper (Hartford Courant) and the New York Times carried stories about the event. The Times account of 5 March 1906 included this text:
Patrick was a gentleman, and to him I would apply the lines:
So may I be courteous to men, faithful to friends, True to my God, a fragrance in the path I trod.
SLC’s lines are slightly mangled, it turns out.
We had the option of not footnoting this segment if we couldn’t identify its source, but the phrasing seemed unusual enough to justify investigation. (Very common phrases are hard to source: their transmission, often garbled by memory or hearsay, cannot be untangled readily.) The more time a colleague and I spent on these lines, the more we wanted to find something we could share with readers.
Because I didn’t have a reliable reference for the poet’s name or the poem’s original publication title until late in my search, I began collecting non-original instances where either the poem or SLC’s version of its final lines was reused. It became an intriguing side question of how catchphrases and related gnomic utterances came to be during the era of mass media (newspapers and weekly magazines) and before the internet. It also shows quite clearly that unattributed plagiarism is not an invention of internet convenience—in case anyone wondered.
What follows, then, is the set of occurrences primarily before 1930, in which “attributed to” names the author, if any is given; “credited to” indicates the publication declared as the reprint source; and an absence of either means the poem is presented with no provenance at all. If a link doesn’t work for you, it goes to a resource available only to subscribers (i.e., via site license), for which apologies.
- Clarence Urmy, “A Song,” Harper’s Bazar 40.3 (Mar 1906), p. 241: found after finding most other items; three-stanza poem credited to Clarence Urmy, ending “fragrance on”
- The American Journal of Dental Science (Madison), 3d ser., vol. 37, [summer] 1906, p. 492: titled “All Sorts and All Sizes”; single-stanza poem (all lines present) credited to “Newspaper” and ending “fragrance on”. The Google Books scan (linked) has a lacuna between page 323 of the January issue and page 492, and I infer the latter to be sometime July–Aug because the scan immediately afterwards is the Oct issue’s cover, but Oct seems to include p. 578. It’s difficult to assess how many pages an average issue contains because of the many lacunae—someone has written “mutilated” on the Dec cover.
- Transactions of the Grand Council of Royal and Select Masters of the State of California, 47th Annual Assembly, 15 Apr 1907, p. 385: three-stanza poem attributed to the speaker, Grand Master C. J. Willett, and ending “fragrance on”
- The Railroad Trainman (Cleveland), vol. 25.6, June 1908, p. 480: titled “I Shall Not Pass Again”; three-stanza poem attributed to “Anon” and ending “fragrance on”
- Chi Psi’s The Purple and Gold, vol. 26, 1909, p. 97: SLC’s snippet, attributed to T. J. Van Alstyne ’03; context is truncated by Google Books but is likely a version of “My Guide” (see 1915 below)
- The Friend (Philadelphia), vol. 84, Fifth Day, Second Month 23, 1911, p. 270: titled “One Life to Live”; three-stanza poem ending “fragrance on”
- British Journal of Nursing, vol. 47, 16 Dec 1911, p. 502: titled “Home Service”; three-stanza poem ending “fragrance on”
- Harley Jackson, “Getting the Most out of Life,” in The Indiana Pulpit, ed. William Henry Book (Standard Publishing, 1912), p. 343 [last page]: three-stanza poem ending “fragrance on”
- T. J. Van Alstyne (M.E. Cornell 1903), “My Guide,” in Illinois Central Magazine [published by Ill. Central Railroad Co.], July 1915, p. 21: quotes SLC’s snippet only; the whole item is credited to C. & O. Ry. Co. Employes’ [sic] Magazine, May 1915
- Denman High School (Neb.) graduation pamphlet, either 1915–16 or 1930 (unclear from presentation): titled “One Life to Live”; three-stanza poem ending “fragrance on”, often with points in place of commas
- Illinois Steel Company: Safety Bulletin, no. 56 (Mar 1917), no page: reprints “My Guide,” including SLC’s snippet, credited to B. R. T. Monthly; the piece is attributed here to an unnamed young engineer who is described as a recent Cornell graduate killed by accident
- Edwin W. Dunlavy, “The Ethics of Publicity,” in Sigma Nu’s The Delta (Indianapolis), vol. 35.4 (Feb 1918), p. 518: gives latter two stanzas (claimed implicitly as Dunlavy’s), adding two exclamation points and ending “fragrance along”
- In National Medical Journal of China, vol. 6 or 7, 1920, p. 207: SLC’s snippet, context hidden by Google Books
- Ruth Adsit (U. of Wy.–Laramie), “Ethics and the Schoolroom,” in Education, vol. 40 (1920), pp. 379–84 at 384: reprints “My Guide,” including SLC’s snippet, the whole uncredited, with young engineer’s death described as having occurred in “the wilds of Canada”
- Walter C. Clephane, “In Memoriam: Job Barnard,” in Records of the Columbia Historical Society, Washington, D.C., vol. 27 (1925), pp. 314–29 at 328–29: three-stanza poem attributed to Clarence Urmy, ending “fragrance on”, but with reversal of “where and when” (breaking rhyme) in line two; says the poem was amongst Barnard’s favorite “clippings”
- Ritual text, Order of the Eastern Star, Milwaukee, Wisc., 2 Oct 1928: three-stanza poem, changing “Plants” to “Spreads” in second stanza and ending “fragrance on”
- Inquiry by C.S.N. of Cornell Univ., Notes and Queries 186.4, 12 Feb 1944, p. 96: SLC snippet only, ending “fragrance in”
- Inquiry by C.S.N., New York Times “Queries and Answers,” 24 Mar 1946, p. 145: SLC snippet only, ending “fragrance in”
- Inquiry by J.S., New York Times “Queries and Answers,” 9 June 1963, p. 349: SLC snippet attributed to Mark Twain and ending “fragrance in”
- Angela Ferguson, “It’s the Little Things…,” blog post, 29 Apr 2007: three-stanza poem typed from unidentified clipping, which attributes the text to Clarence Urmy; introduces several typos and ends “fragrance to”, hence unreliable
Online Archive of California has a description of Urmy’s papers, which are held at Stanford University. The poem does not appear in Urmy’s three published volumes of verse (one, two, three); visiting Stanford to examine the two volumes that remained unpublished and Urmy’s miscellaneous drafts is more than one small footnote can justify.
Here’s the draft bit of annotation, subject to revision:
So may I be courteous to men, faithful to friends, / True to my God, a fragrance in the path I trod] Clemens paraphrased the final lines of a short poem by Clarence Urmy (1858–1923), which was printed in the March 1906 issue of Harper’s Bazar as “A Song” and quoted many times subsequently, often without attribution (Urmy 1906):
I shall not pass this way again, May I be courteous to men, Faithful to friends, true to my God, A fragrance on the path I trod.