VALENTINE.
TO A FAIR ARTISTE.
Written in 1813.
[_]
These, if not the first verses that I ever wrote, are the first with
which I succeeded in pleasing even myself:—in fact, the first in which
I was able to express a preconceived thought in metre. I have
selected them from a mass of juvenile, or more properly, puerile
poetry, not as any better, or much worse, than the rest, but from the
pleasant associations connected with them. It will do nobody any
harm, and to some may be an agreeable remembrancer of old times.
The young lady to whom it was addressed is the eldest daughter of
the late William Green, an artist of great merit, who possessed a true
sense of the beautiful in nature. The lady is now a wife and mother,
and probably regards the pictorial skill of her youth, and the compliments
it may have gained her, as things that have been.
