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ing. The author's general views and sentiments will hardly be mistaken; and the varying aspects of truth,— or, what, at times, may appear as such, could not be reproduced by him, with the requisite force and liveliness, without assuming (for the occasion) as just and real, the feeling or the opinion, which it was intended to represent or express. Some of these opposite presentations are not so much contradictions of opinion, as antagnoist modes of thought and action; each true, within certain limits, and neither complete, without its accompanying counterpart. It will readily be believed that, in these delineations, the author has not felt himself bound, in all cases, like a witness on the stand, to the literal truth of facts; but that, while aiming always at the truth of nature, he has not scrupled, veris miscens falsa, to supply, occasionally, such poetical embellishments as his subject seemed to invite or require. Under this saving clause of fiction, the reader is at liberty to arrange whatever he finds improbable in these sketches, or offensive to his better judgment.

The mottoes are intended, some of them, to express thoughts or sentiments, which the author could

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not so well convey in his own language, - and others to exhibit, under a different form, or with additional

circumstances, the leading idea of the poem to which they are prefixed. In either case, if the reader finds his imagination excited, or his reflections deepened, by the truth, or the fancy of the motto, he will, perhaps, be the more inclined to look with kindness, on the stranger who comes introduced to him, by an old friend, in this new connexion. The labour of selecting these mottoes has tempted the author, in some cases, to write what he could not so readily find; and this, as the easier task, would have been oftener done, if he had not aimed, in this part of his work, at greater variety, as well as excellence, than his own verses were likely to supply.

EPPING, N. H. NOVEMBER 2, 1841.

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