Copyright © 1999, Nancy Kushigian
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Available at: http://www.lib.ucdavis.edu/English/BWRP/Works/WalkSComme.sgm
IF the writer of this humble volume had ever imagined that the feelings and incidents it commemorates would have met the Public eye, apprehension and dread would have chilled every effort of the imagination, and checked every pulse of the heart.
Unlearned and wholly uninstructed in poetic rules, she might with great truth have called these trifles native rhymes,
"Or flowers that all uncultured grew,"
as Feeling was her tutor, and Nature her only
guide; and oftentimes a few lines of poetic effusion were the sole relief to the heart, between the sigh and the tear. Many were written in early youth, which the subjects and style will sufficiently indicate; but very few dates having been preserved, they are scattered indiscriminately throughout the volume. Conscious, however, of their inferiority, the whole would have been consigned to oblivion, had not peculiar circumstances aided the hand of too partial friendship to draw them into view. It is therefore with the blended emotions of REGRET and DIFFIDENCE, that they are now offered to the indulgent, the candid, and the feeling.