University of Virginia Library

TO JOHN RHAY, ESQ., OF NEWNAN,

THIS POEM IS RESPECTFULLY DEDICATED, As a testimony of that respect which is ever due you, from one who sincerely respects and wishes you well; and from one who humbly conceives that the time is fast approaching, when your name will shine in the midst of your professional fraternity with that degree of brilliancy which you have conducted yourself, during your professional career in life.

John, these Poems were written during my leisure hours, when a student of Medicine in Lexington, in 1828–9. You will find many errors, typographical and sentential, which I shall correct on a future occasion. I have only had a few copies printed for the perusal of my friends; and I hope you will not uproot the scion, because it is not, intuitively, a lordly oak.

May your career remain brilliant and unclouded; may you enjoy in this life all the pleasures that wealth can purchase, and fancy can invent;—may the evening of your life, when the candle of vitality begins to glimmer on the shore of death, go down like a brilliant sun: and when you become

resigned “with the angel of the covenant,” to pass through the valley and shadow of death, may you be piloted to that “bourne from whence no traveller” can “return,” to enjoy all the fruitions of another state of existence—is the heart-felt and soul-acknowledged wish, of