BENEDICTION. "BLESSINGS be with them, and eternal praise, WILLIAM WORDSWORTH. PREFACE. READER:- I have brought you here, as one who loves you might bring you pansies and forget-me-nots, such flowers of lyric tenderness and beauty as have long been precious to my own heart, in the hope that their names and symbols may find a favored place in yours; and I have added, here and there, some pretty waif, newly found by the wayside. To fit your nobler emotions, each with its appropriate inspiration or sympathy -courage for courage, brotherhood for brotherhood, resignation for resignation, love for love, whatever may make the fireside dearer for every dear association that dwells, in the form or the spirit, near it has been my pleasant office; and I have culled the several flowers that stand for these with a true heart of kindliness. For you there's rosemary and rue; these keep Grace and remembrance be to you!" "Hot lavender, mints, savory, marjoram, The marigold, that goes to bed with the sun, PREFACE. And, my Fairest Friend, I think I have some flowers o' the Spring that may become your time of day: "Daffodils, That come before the swallow dares, and take The winds of March with beauty; violets dim, But sweeter than the lids of Juno's eyes, with snowdrops of young purity and sinless death. Take these, all of you, and lay them in your bosoms. You that have lost friend or fortune, love or a darling life, shall find your proper consolation here; and turn a kindly thought to him who, in gathering them, has hoped but to find his way to your hearts by favor of what you like the best, having never a care for the mere method of his gift. which must perforce win you, since it is altogether of pure love. And as for those who, with pen or pencil, have helped to make my gift more charming, no thanks of yours or mine can half so well reward them as the sense of having joined to produce a thing of beauty and a joy forever, such as a writer in Blackwood hoped for, when, in an article on "Picture-books," he wrote as follows: "Whether it will ever be possible to make verses and pictures to match,' without sacrificing one of the united arts, is a question which we will not undertake to answer. It does not seem at all unreasonable, however, to suppose that we, who do a great deal for money, might now and then be capable of doing a little our very best-for love; nor that, for PREFACE. their own sakes, as well as for the sake of the non-producing world, literature and art might not sometimes make a volume the chef-d'œuvre, in little, of everybody employed upon it - which should remain to our children after us, the true ideal of gift-books, and console the workers in it with the comfortable thought of one true and worthy present, worthily accompanied, to those unknown friends for whom we make all our books and paint all our pictures. However, no one has attempted the experiment; nobody has tried to get up the ideal gift-book-the love-token worthy of all the authors and all the givers, and of the very love itself of which it should be a sign." NEW YORK, August 12, 1860. J. W. P. |