University of Virginia Library

INTRODUCTION.

A first edition of any work is an expression of the author's confidence in the public; a second is a grateful acknoledgment that this confidence has been rewarded with the public favor.

With the rapid multiplying of writers which the present day is bringing to us, there is altogether too little that is heart poetry. Clever verse and faithful dialect, broad humor and irreverent wit, may serve the purpose of a bread-winner and wake the ephemoral favor of the volatile and mercurial; but the deep souls that transmute their feeling into better lives, and whose present approval means to the writer worthiness of future respect, will ever turn from the lighter vein to commune with those who love God and man, who muse upon life, its ties and mysteries, and there rest themselves. Pope and Goldsmith, with the glittering rapier of pencil wit and keen retort, are not great. One “Deserted Village” outweighs a dozen “Retaliations,” and one “Essay on Man” is more than a dozen “Dunciads.”

Mrs. Heard's muse is sacred and sentimental. She appeals to the best in us. Where there is no response, the mansion of the soul is falling into ruins. Nor is she devoid of the power to use the scalpel of sarcasm and wit, as witness in her “Time and Things Have Changed,” which is a clever and scathing review of the frivolities of the times.

Altogether, Mrs. Heard's poems are salutary and wholesome. They breathe true faith and tender love to God. They are pre-eminently poems for the home. Your child and mine will be deeper, more devout, and more soulful followers of God from their persual. And the fervor that breathes in them all, telling of a woman's heart inditing with a poet's hand, is needed in these shallow nineteenth century lives that have been let loose

upon the world, to bring them into the true estate of human rather than animal living.

It is true neither the furor of a fad, nor the childish acclamations of the thoughtless will attend the publishing of that whose power is in its peacefulness and purity; but a more enduring if more tardy judgment will place a chaplet unfading upon the writer who scorns the populartiy of pandering.

Dedicated to friendship, to love, to virtue and to God as “Morning Glories” is, it needs not my approval to win its way, though that approval it has; it needs not the censor in the home to prove its pages, for it is all good; it can well disregard the carless glances of palsied character, for its fate is in the verdict of the good; its mission to the ones who have not forgotten home and mother and who have still the right to hope for happiness and heaven; and these are to be known by their power to feel what is here written.