This Poem was written under the circumstances which its title implies. Three years since, as the author was descending the Ohio, to become a citizen of the West, he wrote a considerable number of stanzas, expressive of his feelings, six or eight of which were published as a fragment on his arrival in Cincinnati, in the Commercial Daily Advertiser, and republished and noticed by different prints in a way that induced the author, from time to time, to add stanzas to stanzas, until they almost imperceptibly reached their present number. He wrote on, without any previous study of the style or manner in which the subject should be pursued––using the poetic license of light and shade as Fancy dictated. Being in ill health, and coming to a strange land, it was very natural for his Reflections to be of a sombre cast, without there being any thing peculiar in his situation differing from that of other Emigrants.

The reader will perceive that the metrical arrangement of the stanzas is the same as that used by Gray, in his Ode to Adversity, with this difference, that the Ode is written in lines of eight syllables, and the author has attempted the heroic measure.

After the Poem had been finished some time, the author delivered it in the Hall of the Lyceum to an assemblage of Ladies and Gentlemen. Their reception and that of the several editors (to whom he is most grateful) who noticed its delivery, and gave extracts from the Poem, induced him to publish it.

The author has by him many manuscript pieces with which he might have swelled the volume to a much greater size; but as this is his first attempt at authorship, in the shape of a volume, he offers it, tremblingly, at the ordeal of public opinion, merely as a sample of his ware.