University of Virginia Library

AUTHOR'S PREFACE.

In submitting this collection of verse to the public I do not seek to gratify any personal vanity. During twenty years of active journalism in New York I have found it to be true that the successes we achieve in life, of whatever character, usually cost us so much in effort and anxiety that very little capacity for the enjoyment of the fruits of our labors is left us. I dare say this is a common experience. Very few men go to sleep unknown and wake up famous, as Byron did, while they are yet young; it more often happens that such good fortune comes after years of patient toil and waiting, and when the capacity to enjoy success is lacking. In our youth we are carried forward in every effort by an enthusiasm and a confidence which defy obstacles and laugh at criticism and judicious advice; in maturer age we are governed by a philosophy which comprehends in its calculation every obstacle, and invites rather than repels criticism and judicious advice. The confidence of youth is replaced by the skepticism of maturity. A piece of work which, at the age of twenty, we may regard as being well nigh perfect, is more than likely to be regarded as being very tame and commonplace and faulty at forty.

Of the accumulated mass of matter which I have composed for my own amusement and pastime during the past twenty-five years, I found by far the larger part more adapted to the grate than the public eye; and, perhaps, much that has been preserved and presented in this volume might more appropriately have been committed to the flames; because, after all is said and done, we are more partial to our

own progeny, of whatever sort, than others can be, and blind to faults in it which become apparent to others upon the most superficial observation. And yet I have the satisfaction of having labored earnestly not to impose upon the reader any scrap of work the reading of which might be regarded as a waste of time; the chief aim of all writing being either to instruct or amuse the reader.

That the scene of most of the poems in this volume should be laid in Florida is natural, as I was born in that State and love it above all others, and shall always do so, and as early impressions exercise a more lasting influence, for weal or woe, upon the mind than any other. However we will, the impressions made upon the mind between the years of childhood and manhood color all of our future thought and effort. The home where we were born, the persons whose lives touched our own, however remotely; the public square in which we played marbles or “shinny,” the ponds in which we bathed in summer, the little streams in which we fished, the fields in which we set traps for birds, the dear little church, the stately court house and the sombre jail, and the village schoolhouse—the remembrance of these abides with us in the hurly-burly of after years, however far we wander from them and whatever other associations may enter into our lives and become a part therof.

The various history and romance of Florida appeal more strongly to her own children than to others, and will probably do so more in the future than in the past. The long struggle of Spaniard and Englishman and Frenchman and Indian, and the too little known “Exiles of Florida”—of whom Joshua R. Giddings wrote with so much eloquence and sympathy and pathos—make the whole State a veritable storehouse of priceless treasure to the literary antiquary.