“Will you please to state that Jenny Lind having expressed a strong desire to sing at her first concert in New York a ‘Welcome to America,’ and Mr. Jules Benedict, the eminent composer, having volunteered to set such a composition to music, I hereby offer two hundred dollars for such a song as may be accepted for the above purpose by the following committee:--Messrs. George Ripley, Jules Benedict, Lewis Gaylord Clarke, J. S. Redfield, and Geo. P. Putnam. The songs to be addressed to the committee box, No. 2743 Post Office, New York, and to reach here by the 1st of September.” Seven hundred and fifty-three poems were submitted to the judges, and the prize was finally awarded to Bayard Taylor, whose contribution does not do him any credit. In its report the Prize Committee stated frankly that a large proportion of the productions were “not fit to feed the pigs.” The announcement that Taylor’s poem had won the prize created a storm of protest, and most of the other 752 poets rushed or wrote to favorite newspaper editors, crying fraud. Putnam, one of the judges, was Bayard Taylor’s publisher, and George Ripley was one of Taylor’s colleagues on the staff of the _New York Tribune_. But the judges were not guilty of fraud, however appearances may have been against them. They submitted two poems, the one by Taylor, and one by Epes Sargent, to Jenny Lind, who, reluctant to sing any such song, chose Bayard Taylor’s because it was shorter.[8] Taylor’s ode read: GREETING TO AMERICA Words by Bayard Taylor--Music by Julius Benedict “I greet with a full heart the Land of the West, Whose Banner of Stars o’er a world is unrolled; Whose empire o’ershadows Atlantic’s wide breast, And opens to sunset its gateway of gold! The land of the mountain, the land of the lake, And rivers that roll in magnificent tide-- Where the souls of the mighty from slumber awake, And hallow the soil for whose freedom they died! “Thou Cradle of Empire! though wide be the foam That severs the land of my fathers and thee, I hear, from thy bosom, the welcome of home, For song has a home in the hearts of the Free! And long as thy waters shall gleam in the sun, And long as thy heroes remember their scars, Be the hands of thy children united as one, And Peace shed her light on thy Banner of Stars!”