  We seldom see a preface in the back of a book, or a frontispiece in the middle, but as I have always been considered a little eccentric, I will make a new departure, and thank my indulgent readers here for their patient perusal of these pages. I locate these honeyed words in the rear as a reward of merit to any one that is martyr enough to reach them by the regular route, and those that have not energy and endurance enough to do so deserve to lose these chunks of wisdom and words of cheer. In the preceding poems are depicted sentiments to suit my changing moods; streaks of mirth and wails of misery; childhood’s mischief and woman’s woe; a mixture of ecstasy and agony, to suit “the gay or the grave, the TRANSCRIBER’S NOTE Obvious typographical errors and punctuation errors have been corrected after careful comparison with other occurrences within the text and consultation of external sources. Poetic contractions have been treated consistently. Common contractions with is or has [such as she’s, there’s, that’s] have no space, but less common ones have retained the space usually but not always found in the original book [such as night ’s, turn ’s, mine ’s]. The space has been removed from other common phrases with contractions, for example ’T was has been changed to ’Twas, can ’t has been changed to can’t. Except for those changes noted below, all misspellings in the text, and inconsistent or archaic usage, have been retained. Table of Contents: ‘My Childhood’ replaced by ‘My Infancy’. |
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