PREFACE. THESE Poems are the results of much enforced leisure; nor can his most unfavourable critic hope more earnestly than the author, that this leisure may speedily have an end. Not that he intends to give up writing, but that he finds, as many have found, that when a man works of necessity, the better he can otherwise work of pleasure. Leisure is the couch of the mind, and to work at leisure is to work when lying at full length. Such work is of necessity unstable and unequal, fitful with hasty power and sudden feebleness. Half-successes which are whole-faults, are as apparent in this book, |