It is useless for me to attempt to depict the image of my charmer to you. To others, she was only a neighbor’s lassie, good enough and pretty in her way, but nothing uncommon. To me she was all that was fair and canny, and as beautiful and good as Eve appeared to her Adam, in all her innocent purity of expression on that first awakening which we are told of in the beautiful allegory of old. In 1827 I was united to my dear one, and we commenced life anew, as happy as two birds; and, though from my poetic fancy and ardent temperament, I was led to look for more happiness in a life of conjugal felicity than it is possible for mortals to attain, yet, upon the whole, my domestic life was a blessing to my inner self, and in its bowers I wove some of the sweetest garlands that graced my name. Poverty and toil, with their train of evils, still attended me, and in 1830, work being slack at home, I went to Picardy, leaving my family of wife and three children. The revolution had paralyzed trade in France, and it was impossible to procure employment there; consequently, after experiencing much suffering, I returned home only to find my family in a workhouse, from whence I removed them to a Manchester garret, where we would have starved had it not been for the labors of my wife at power-loom weaving. That was a time of misery. At length I obtained temporary employment, and our prospects began to brighten a little, but through all my life a scarcity of remunerative work seemed to attend me like a fatality. During my residence at Manchester I began to contribute short poetic pieces to the local papers and periodicals, which, by the kindness of friends, and those powerful in government affairs, whose attention was first called to me by the perusal of my literary productions, were issued in volumes from time to time. The first of these, “Hours with the Muses,” was brought out in 1840, and reached its third edition in two years. The subsequent volumes were: “Dreams and Realities in Verse,” 1847; the “Poetic Rosary,” 1856; “Miscellaneous Poems,” 1861, and one more containing all my principal poems, published the year of my death, 1866. I have been accused of imitating the style of others, but while I may have done so to some extent, I think none of my critics will deny that the ideas expressed, and the thoughts embodied, together with the arrangement of language in my productions, were entirely my own. At the same time I was never satisfied with my efforts; none of them reached my standard of excellence, and they sometimes bore marks of my disappointment and dissatisfaction.