DEDICATION.

TO MY FATHER.

WHEN your eyes fall upon this page of dedication, and you start to see to whom it is inscribed, your first thought will be of the time, far off, when I was a child, and wrote verses, and when I dedicated them to you, who were my public and my critic. Of all that such a recollection implies of saddest and sweetest to both of us, it would become neither of us to speak before the world; nor would it be possible for us to speak of it to one another with voices that did not falter. Enough, that what is in my heart when I write thus will be fully known to yours.

And my desire is, that you, who are a witness how, if this art of poetry had been a less earnest object to me, it must have fallen from exhausted hands before this day, that you, who have shared with me in things bitter and sweet, softening or enhancing them, every day, that you, who hold with me, over all sense of loss and transiency, one hope by one name, - may accept from me the inscription of these volumes, the exponents of a few years of an existence which has been sustained and comforted by you, as well as given. Somewhat more faint-hearted than I used to be, it is my fancy thus to seem to return to a visible personal dependence on you, as if indeed I were a child again; to conjure your beloved image between myself and the public, so as to be sure of one smile; and to satisfy my heart, while I sanctify my ambition, by associating with the great pursuit of my life its tenderest and holiest affection.

LONDON, 50 WIMPOLE STREET, 1844.

V

Your

E. B. B.

ADVERTISEMENT.

THIS edition, including my earlier and later writings, I have endeavored to render as little unworthy as possible of the indulgence of the public. Several poems I would willingly have withdrawn, if it were not almost impossible to extricate what has been once caught and involved in the machinery of the press. The alternative is a request to the generous reader that he may use the weakness of those earlier verses, which no subsequent revision has succeeded in strengthening, less as a reproach to the writer than as a means of marking some progress in her other attempts.

LONDON, 1856.

E. B. B.