AMERICAN PREFACE. 
Not the least pleasing indication amongst us, is that 
far-spread and growing fondness for works of elegant taste 
and literature, which argues a tendency to the refined and 
elevating in our people, and will not fail to counteract 
much of that sordid, hardening character likely to be en 
gendered by the money-getting spirit which is the re¬ 
proach of the age, not a characteristic of our country, as has 
too often been insinuated, and might be most easily dis¬ 
proved. Foreigners have remarked upon the prevalence of 
the poetic faculty in every grade of society throughout the 
land; and Carlyle has recently been at pains to indulge his 
spleen against poetry, by a letter of advice to a young 
friend of his residing in one of our cities, in which he begs 
him to refrain from making verses till driven thereto by 
some great and irresistible need—which things are in proof 
of the tendency of which we speak. Were other authority 
needed, we might cite the constant and increasing demand 
for works of a character akin to the one we here present to 
the American public. 
