Poems

E-text prepared by Juliet Sutherland, Leonard Johnson, and the Project Gutenberg Online Distributed Proofreading Team (http://www.pgdp.net)
BY MARY BAKER EDDY
AUTHOR OF SCIENCE AND HEALTH WITH KEY TO THE SCRIPTURES
Published by The Trustees under the Will of Mary Baker G. Eddy BOSTON, U.S.A.
Authorized Literature of The First Church of Christ, Scientist in Boston, Massachusetts
Copyright, 1910 By Mary Baker Eddy
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
The poems garnered up in this little volume were written at different periods in the life of the author, dating from her early girlhood up to recent years. They were not written with a view of making a book, each poem being the spontaneous outpouring of a deeply poetic nature and called forth by some experience that claimed her attention.
The Old Man of the Mountain, for instance, was written while the author was contemplating this lofty New Hampshire crag, whose rugged outlines resemble the profile of a human face. Inspired by the grandeur of this masterpiece of nature's handiwork, and looking up through nature, unto nature's God, the poem began to take form in her thought, and alighting from her carriage, she seated herself by the roadside and began to write. Some tourists who were passing, and who made her acquaintance, asked her what she was writing, and she replied by reading the poem to them. They were so pleased with it that each requested a copy, which was subsequently mailed to them. Similar requests continued to reach the author for years afterward, until the poem finally found its way into print, appearing, together with The Valley Cemetery, in a book Gems for You, published in Manchester, N. H., in 1850, and again in Boston, in 1856.
The poem on the Dedication of a Temperance Hall, in Lynn, Mass., in 1866, was written for that occasion, and was sung by the audience as a dedicatory hymn. The Liberty Bells appeared in a Lynn, Mass., newspaper, under the date of February 3, 1865. A note from the author, which was published with the poem, read as follows: