Educational recitation

On his/her blog Literary Luffa – The Sponge of Literature, ‘granteh’ reviews Henry A. Young’s Young’s Juvenile Speaker (Boston: DeWolfe, Fiske & Co., 1887), a collection of “really awful moral [and in some cases racist] poems.” (The child pictured on the cover looks like he/she agrees with granteh.) The only jewel in the manure, in granteh’s judgment, is Ralph Waldo Emerson’s “The Mountain and the Squirrel.” Question is, how did Emerson end up in this muck heap of malodorous verse? Was it because he tried to rhyme “put” and “nut,” which leads to a very awkward-sounding ending? (Read it aloud yourself and you’ll see what I mean.) And no one wants to “crack a neut,” unless one is Inspector Clousseau, non? I wonder how many poor little blighters flubbed that poem in class.