have faithfully transcribed from my
materials. Yet such is human nature, that the excitement of mind was dear
to me, and that the imagination, painter of tempest and earthquake, or,
worse, the stormy and ruin-fraught passions of man, softened my real
sorrows and endless regrets, by clothing these fictitious ones in that
ideality, which takes the mortal sting from pain.

I hardly know whether this apology is necessary. For the merits of my
adaptation and translation must decide how far I have well bestowed my time
and imperfect powers, in giving form and substance to the frail and
attenuated Leaves of the Sibyl.

CHAPTER I.

I AM the native of a sea-surrounded nook, a cloud-enshadowed land, which,
when the surface of the globe, with its shoreless ocean and trackless
continents, presents itself to my mind, appears only as an inconsiderable
speck in the immense whole; and yet, when balanced in the scale of mental
power, far outweighed countries of larger extent and more numerous
population. So true it is, that man's mind alone was the creator of all
that was good or great to man, and that Nature herself was only his first
minister. England, seated far north in the turbid sea, now visits my dreams
in the semblance of a vast and well-manned ship, which mastered the winds
and rode proudly over the waves. In my boyish days she was the universe to
me. When I stood on my native hills, and saw plain and mountain stretch out
to the utmost limits of my vision, speckled by the dwellings of my
countrymen, and subdued to fertility by their labours, the earth's very
centre was fixed for me in that spot, and the rest of her orb was as a
fable, to have forgotten which would have cost neither my imagination nor
understanding an effort.

My fortunes have been, from the beginning, an exemplification of the power
that mutability may possess over the varied tenor of man's life. With
regard to myself, this came almost by inheritance. My father was one of
those men on whom nature had bestowed to prodigality the envied gifts of
wit and imagination, and then left his bark of life to be impelled by these
winds, without adding reason as the rudder, or judgment as the pilot for
the voyage. His extraction was obscure; but circumstances brought him early
into public notice, and his small paternal property was soon dissipated in
the splendid scene of fashion and luxury in which he was an actor. During
the short years of thoughtless youth, he