Page:The works of Anne Bradstreet in prose and verse.djvu/15

Rh out at the end of the book. All the contents of this book are printed in this volume : the order, however, of the separate parts of which it is composed, has been changed. The portion in her son's handwriting, and the verses which I have mentioned as being at the end of the book, being in their nature biographical, I have placed first. The "Meditations," and the fragment of their translation into Latin by her great-grandson, come next.

The manuscript has been closely followed, except that abbreviations, such as "&," "w"\" "y%" "y\" and some of longer words, have been printed in full. These are very common in the portion written by her son, who probably tried to shorten his work of copying as much as possible. The author herself rarely uses any abbreviations. Punctuation has been supplied where it was defective; and in some of the poems, whose rhyme required it, the alternate verses have been indented, and some poems have been broken into stanzas. The manuscript has been scribbled over, apparently-- by a child; and a few corrections have been made since she wrote, in ink fresher than the original: these, of course, have been disregarded.

With these exceptions, the reader has an exact copy of the manuscript. A faccimile of the first leaf of the volume may be found between pages 46 and 47.

Extracts from the manuscript, with some appropriate remarks on the author's life and character, were published by the Rev. William I. Budington, D.D., for many years pastor of the First Church in Charlestown, in his history of that church; and almost the whole of it appeared in a series of articles, under the title of " The Puritan Mother," contributed by the same gentleman to the first