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years ago, my dear friend, when you and I had more of the poetry of life at our hearts than, I fear, is left to either of us now, I inscribed with your name a certain slender volume of Poems, printed but not published. Of the hundred copies of those boyish indiscretions which, full of all unimaginable errors of type and press, owed their origin to a French printer, I have not to this day given away more than two or three- and-twenty. I dedicated to you then a book only to be circulated among friends, on the tacit understanding that they were to be alike willing to forgive and eager to commend. I dedicate to you now a book which, the moment it passes from me, goes among readers of whom even the kindly are too luke-warm to praise, the hostile are pre-resolved to