For some remarks on the nature and history of the Sonnet and its peculiar excellence, as exemplified by Milton, the reader is referred to the Notes at the close of this book. The Author regards it as by its fixed laws and its structure the very best form of poetry for one short, complete, meditative lesson. A collection of such distinct, separate little poems,—mostly written within a recent period,—and not mingled with other forms of poetry,—constitutes this little volume.

The notes annexed are historical and illustrative, elucidatory of what from the necessary brevity of the verse might be otherwise left obscure, or such as seemed to be required by the unevasible claims and the infinite worth of the revealed Christian truth, which makes the texture of these sonnets.

While Petrarch, the inventor of the Sonetto, Spenser, Shakespeare, Wordsworth, and other foreign poets have written a multitude of sonnets, it is to the author a matter of surprise, that not more than half a dozen sonnets—within his knowledge—have ever been sent forth by any one of our poets; so that this may be regarded as the first book of American Sonnets ever published.

An old man, the tenant for a year past of a sick chamber, who from early life has been a student and cultivator of poetry, has found not a little pleasure in such musings, as he now offers to the public. His meditations, it may well be supposed, have not been of fictitious scenes. Aware of his liableness at any moment to be summoned away from this world,—which to his eye is filled with beauty mingled indeed with deformity,—into a world of undefaced loveliness and eternal glory, he could not have excused himself, if he had employed the precarious time lent to him in drawing idle, uninstructive, unprofitable pictures; but his mind has been filled with intense thoughts on God's pure, unchanging, soul-saving Truth; and he has endeavored to give true sketches, however faint and feeble, of divine and eternal realities not unworthy of the contemplation nor unfit to awaken the affections of rational, immortal men. The uninterrupted study of God's Word for 50 or 60 years may be his apology for declaring what in his judgment are plainly and indubitably some of the great truths of that Word. But he earnestly asks the reader to search the Scriptures with his own eyes. What God has said is true.

Northampton, Dec. 19, 1859