me early familiar
with the thought that God always held in his special keeping those
children whose fathers he had taken before their birth. This confidence
accompanied me through all my after life.

As I have said, it was long before I became aware that I lacked
anything, especially any blessing so great as a father's faithful love
and care; and when life showed to me also a stern face and imposed heavy
burdens, my courage was strengthened by my happy confidence that I was
one of Fortune's favorites, as others are buoyed up by their firm faith
in their "star."

When the time at last came that I longed to express the emotions of my
soul in verse, I embodied my mother's prediction in the lines:

The child who first beholds the light of day
After his father's eyes are closed for aye,
Fortune will guard from every threatening ill,
For God himself a father's place will fill.

People often told me that as the youngest, the nestling, I was my
mother's "spoiled child"; but if anything spoiled me it certainly was
not that. No child ever yet received too many tokens of love from a
sensible mother; and, thank Heaven, the word applied to mine. Fate had
summoned her to be both father and mother to me and my four brothers and
sisters-one little brother, her second child, had died in infancy--and
she proved equal to the task. Everything good which was and is ours we
owe to her, and her influence over us all, and especially over me, who
was afterward permitted to live longest in close relations with her,
was so great and so decisive, that strangers would only half understand
these stories of my childhood unless I gave a fuller description of her.

These details are intended particularly for my children, my brothers and
sisters, and the dear ones connected with our family by ties of blood
and friendship, but I see no reason for not making them also accessible
to wider circles. There has been no lack of requests from friends that
I should write them, and many of those who listen willingly when I tell
romances will doubtless also be glad to learn something concerning the
life of the fabulist, who, however, in these records intends to silence
imagination and adhere rigidly to the motto of his later life, "To be
truthful in love."

My mother's likeness as a young woman accompanies these pages, and must
spare me the task of describing her appearance. It was copied from the
life-size portrait completed