Transcriber's Note
The cover image was modified to remove a label, and to add the title and author text. The modified image is placed in the public domain.
A
BOOK
OF
CHRISTIAN SONNETS.
PUBLISHED BY BRIDGMAN & CHILDS.
1860.
Northampton.
PREFACE.
For some remarks on the nature and history of the Sonnet andits peculiar excellence, as exemplified by Milton, the reader isreferred to the Notes at the close of this book. The Author regardsit as by its fixed laws and its structure the very best form of poetryfor one short, complete, meditative lesson. A collection of suchdistinct, separate little poems,—mostly written within a recentperiod,—and not mingled with other forms of poetry,—constitutesthis little volume.
The notes annexed are historical and illustrative, elucidatory ofwhat from the necessary brevity of the verse might be otherwiseleft obscure, or such as seemed to be required by the unevasibleclaims and the infinite worth of the revealed Christian truth, whichmakes the texture of these sonnets.
While Petrarch, the inventor of the Sonetto, Spenser, Shakespeare,Wordsworth, and other foreign poets have written amultitude of sonnets, it is to the author a matter of surprise, that notmore than half a dozen sonnets—within his knowledge—have everbeen sent forth by any one of our poets; so that this may beregarded as the first book of American Sonnets ever published.
An old man, the tenant for a year past of a sick chamber, whofrom early life has been a student and cultivator of poetry, has foundnot a little pleasure in such musings, as he now offers to the public.His meditations, it may well be supposed, have not been of fictitiousscenes. Aware of his liableness at any moment to be summoned[4]away from this world,—which to his eye is filled withbeauty mingled indeed with deformity,—into a world of undefacedloveliness and eternal glory, he could not have excused himself, ifhe had employed the precarious time lent to him in drawing idle,uninstructive, unprofitable pictures; but his mind has been filledwith intense thoughts on God's pure, unchanging, soul-savingTruth; and he has endeavored to give true sketches, however faintand feeble, of divine and eternal realities not unworthy of thecontemplation nor unfit to awaken the affections of rational,immortal men. The uninterrupted study of God's Word for 50or 60 years may be his apology for declaring what in his judgmentare plainly and indubitably some of the great truths of that Word.But he earnestly asks the reader to search the Scriptures with hisown eyes. What God has said is true.
Northampton, Dec. 19, 1859