"The Poet is a poem, which but few Can read, to understand! His mind, a book Of nature's lore, is shadowed, - like a brook That rolls through leafy woods,- by thoughts that strew BOSTON: PHILLIPS, SAMPSON AND COMPANY. 1851. 1 Entered, according to Act of Congress, in the year 1850, BY H. F. GOULD, In the Clerk's Office of the District Court of Massachusetts. PREFACE. THE delicate aromatic flowering-shrub, DIOSMA, may be said, both literally and metaphorically, to have been in high odor with the ancients in Greece and Rome. They made it sacred, used it in their temples, and named it after their supreme divinity. The typical allusion intended, in thus adopting the name of such a perennial, will be obvious, I hope, in the character and qualities of the poems. Those here from my own pen are, in part, now in print for the first time, and in part, selections from my volumes of such as were deemed most acceptable to the reader. Those by other writers are of foreign origin, as far as can be ascertained from the fugitive form in which they were found, and discovered to be of such worth, that I thought it desirable to have them embodied in a convenient manual. If, in doing this, I have trespassed on the rights of any American author, I hope the sin of ignorance will be winked at; while my aim has been to make a pleasant and wholesome presentation to those who may choose a flower, as well for its intrinsic virtues, as for its outward beauty. Newburyport, Mass., } H. F. GOULD. |