A Poem,
BY FREDERICK W. THOMAS.
“Westward the star of Empire takes its way.”
From the original Edition of 1833, to which isadded a memoir of the author.
CINCINNATI:
PRINTED FOR J. DRAKE.
SPILLER, PRINTER.
1872.
Entered, according to Act of Congress, in the year 1872:By JOSIAH DRAKE,In the office of the Librarian of Congress at Washington.
PAGE | |
| Preface | iii |
| Dedication | v |
| Memoir | vii |
| The Emigrant | 9 |
| Notes | 41 |
| Errata | 48 |
This Poem was written under the circumstanceswhich its title implies. Three years since, as the authorwas descending the Ohio, to become a citizen ofthe West, he wrote a considerable number of stanzas,expressive of his feelings, six or eight of which werepublished as a fragment on his arrival in Cincinnati,in the Commercial Daily Advertiser, and republishedand noticed by different prints in a way that inducedthe author, from time to time, to add stanzas to stanzas,until they almost imperceptibly reached theirpresent number. He wrote on, without any previousstudy of the style or manner in which the subjectshould be pursued––using the poetic license of lightand shade as Fancy dictated. Being in ill health, andcoming to a strange land, it was very natural for hisReflections to be of a sombre cast, without there beingany thing peculiar in his situation differing fromthat of other Emigrants.
The reader will perceive that the metrical arrangementof the stanzas is the same as that used by Gray,in his Ode to Adversity, with this difference, that theOde is written in lines of eight syllables, and the authorhas attempted the heroic measure.
After the Poem had been finished some time, theau