In the Clerk's Office of the District Court of the District of Massachusetts.

PREFACE.

T

HIS volume is believed to contain all the extant works of ANNE BRADSTREET. Three editions of her "Poems" have been printed. The first edition appeared in London in 1650, under the title of "The Tenth Mufe, lately sprung up in America;" a neatly-printed volume in small 16mo, xiv and 207 pages.

The second edition was printed in Boston, by John Foster, in 1678. It contained the additions and corrections of the author, and several poems found amongst her papers after her death; together with some verses in praise of her poems by President Rogers, of Harvard College, and "A Funeral Elogy," upon the author, by the Rev. John Norton, of Hingham. Like the first edition, it is a 16mo; but the page and type are larger. The second edition has two hundred and fifty-five pages, preceded by fourteen pages unnumbered. Copies of the titlepages of the first and second editions, as exact as modern-antique type can make them, are given on pages 79 and 81.

The third edition, in crown 8vo, xiv and 233 pages, was published in Boston in 1758, without bearing the name of its publisher or printer. It had the following titlepage:

A

SEVERAL

POEMS

Compiled with great Variety of WIT and LEARNING, full of DELIGHT;

Wherein especially is contained, a compleat Difcourfe and Description of

The Four

ELEMENTS,

CONSTITUTIONS,

AGES of MAN,

SEASONS of the Year.

Together with an exact EPITOME of the three first

MONARCHIES, viz. the

The THIRD EDITION, corrected by the Author, and enlarged by an Addition of feveral other POEMS found amongst her Papers after her Death.

Re-printed from the second Edition, in the Year M.DCC. LVIII.

Although it was reprinted from the second edition, there were numerous omissions of words, changes in the spelling, and other alterations of little importance.

In the present edition of the "Poems," the spelling and punctuation, and even the typographical mistakes, of the second edition have been retained. The headings to the pages are new, and the catch-words have been omitted. The paging of that edition is preserved in brackets in the margin. The corrections in the second edition were extensive. The spelling was, as a rule, modernized; although some words, especially proper names, have an older or more incorrect form of spelling in that than in the first edition. Grammatical mistakes were corrected; capitals were omitted from common nouns which had them in the first; the punctuation was improved; and a great many words, enclosed in brackets in the first edition, were without them in the second edition. But no rule is uniformly adhered to in any of these particulars. There is, in both editions, as Charles Lamb's old friend said of a black-letter text of Chaucer, "a deal of very indifferent spelling." A proper name is sometimes, on the same page, spelt in two different ways. I have marked the most important alterations in foot-notes. Mere transpositions of words, changes in punctuation and in the spelling of words other than proper names, and trifling corrections, not materially affecting the sense of a passage, have not been noted. I hope that I have let nothing pass which would have been of interest to any reader.

Some of these alterations may have been made by the publishers, after the author's death. In order to have shown all the changes, it would have been necessary to