Excerpt from The Poems of Charles Fenno Hoffman My Dear Sir, - You may remember some three or four years since having asked me for a list of the various signatures under which my anonymous verses had appeared in different American periodicals during the last twenty years. You are perhaps aware, also, of the disparaging remarks which your free and flattering use, in "The Poetry of America," of the verses thus patiently collected by you, has called out in some quarters. I have often regretted that I permitted those effusions (most of which had long since answered the casual purpose for which they were written) to be thus exhumed: regretted it, not from any particular sensibility to the critical dicta by which they have been assailed; but simply because, like many a sanguine yet indolent person originally conscious of rather vivid poetic aspirations, I had, from my boyhood upward, from early manhood onward. "lived along in the hope of doing something or other" in the way of a poem that my countrymen would not unwillingly let live: and because (while thus probably much overrating poetic powers in reserve) I was unwilling that these fugitive pieces should fix a character upon my writings it might be difficult to supersede by any subsequent effort in a higher order of composition. That fanciful regret, if not abated, has, with the considerations from which it sprung, been swallowed up lately by a reality which I deem of more imperious moment than any thing affecting mere literary reputation. One of those British reviews, which, in the absence of an international copyright, do the thinking of this country upon literary matters, and which, you know, are circulated so widely and are of such authority here that it is idle for an American author to refuse to plead to any indictment they may prefer, has recently done me the honor, amid a confused mass of indiscriminate accusations against my countrymen at large, to select me specially and individually for the odious charge of gross and hitherto unheard-of literary dishonesty. Now, my dear sir, while it is due to you to relieve you from all responsibility as godfather of these questionable effusions, by publishing them under my own name, - this is likewise the only way by which so sweeping and damnatory a charge can be fully met, without involving myself in egotistical explanations far worse than those I am furnishing here, because they would be endless. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.