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Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1850, by S. G. SIMPKINS,

In the Clerk's Office of the District Court of Massachusetts.

Stereotyped by
HOBART & ROBBINS;

NEW ENGLAND TYPE AND STEREOTYPE FOUNDERY,

BOSTON

PREFACE.

WHILE School education especially aims to develop the understanding and form good mental habits, it must not neglect to interest the imagination and refine the taste. There is a delicacy of taste and of sentiment, and an intellectual richness, which can be perfected only by an intimate acquaintance with nature and art, and the human soul; and the foundation of these may be most successfully laid in childhood by the study of poetry,—of the finest thoughts clothed in the most attractive garb.

It is with this design of presenting beauty, both moral and natural, in its manifold shapes, as it is shown to us in the universe, that the present collection has been made. The pieces chosen are, with very few exceptions, entire, because passages are always injured by being taken from their connection, and because young persons like to know the whole of a thing. They are short, and selected from the whole range of English and American standard authors; it being thought better to offer sentiments as they arise in a great variety of minds, and "mould themselves into gentle verse." They are not exclusively of one school or time, for beauty is not to be prisoned. The artist finds it not complete in one model, but studies it in all its appearances, and then, though he paint but one face or one landscape, he gives us the wealth of a world.

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