Entered, according to Act of Congress, in the year 1872: By JOSIAH DRAKE, In the office of the Librarian of Congress at Washington.
CONTENTS.
| PAGE | |
| Preface | [iii] |
| Dedication | [v] |
| Memoir | [vii] |
| The Emigrant | [9] |
| Notes | [41] |
| Errata | [48] |
PREFACE.
This Poem was written under the circumstances which its title implies. Three years since, as the author was descending the Ohio, to become a citizen of the West, he wrote a considerable number of stanzas, expressive of his feelings, six or eight of which were published as a fragment on his arrival in Cincinnati, in the Commercial Daily Advertiser, and republished and noticed by different prints in a way that induced the author, from time to time, to add stanzas to stanzas, until they almost imperceptibly reached their present number. He wrote on, without any previous study of the style or manner in which the subject should be pursued––using the poetic license of light and shade as Fancy dictated. Being in ill health, and coming to a strange land, it was very natural for his Reflections to be of a sombre cast, without there being any thing peculiar in his situation differing from that of other Emigrants.
The reader will perceive that the metrical arrangement of the stanzas is the same as that used by Gray, in his Ode to Adversity, with this difference, that the Ode is written in lines of eight syllables, and the author has attempted the heroic measure.