Excerpt from The Spring of Life: A Didactic Poem, in Four Books, With Historical and Illustrative NotesHan this poem been published in England, where the larger portion of it was written. It would have required but a short preface. In a country were the majority of the population is ill educated and literature is divided into two languages, where the press does not produce annually a tithe of the reprints includingechool books, nor more original works, than a provincial town of twenty-five or thirty thousand inhabitants of the mother country, and where I believe was never before offered to the public a poem of the like length and of the same kind. I feel that I ought not only to explain its nature. But to advocate and advance the cause of literature in general and poetry in particular to the utmost of my power.About the PublisherForgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.comThis 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.