Produced by Roberta Staehlin, JoAnn Greenwood, and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive/American Libraries.) Transcriber's Note: In "Descriptions of the Divine Being", P. 96, the block quote inside ~ (tilde) marks is a transliteration of the Hebrew. The transliteration was not present in the original and has been added by the transcriber; [h.] is used for Het, to distinguish it from h for Hey. The UTF8 and HTML versions also have the Hebrew script shown in the original. Remaining transcriber's notes are at the end of the text. THE PORTLAND SKETCH BOOK. EDITED BY MRS. ANN S. STEPHENS. PORTLAND: COLMAN & CHISHOLM. Arthur Shirley, Printer. 1836. Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1836, by EDWARD STEPHENS, in the Clerk's Office of the District Court of Maine. PREFACE. The object of the Portland Sketch-Book, is to collect in a small compass, literary specimens from such authors as have a just claim to be styled Portland writers. The list might have been extended to a much greater length, had all been included who have made our city a place of transient residence; but no writer has a place in this volume who is not, or has not been, a citizen of Portland, either by birth or a long residence. Therefore, all the names contained in these pages are emphatically those of Portland authors. Among those who were actually born here and either wholly, or in part educated here, will be found the following names, most of which are already known to the world of literature. S. B. Beckett--James Brooks--William Cutter--Charles S. Daveis--Nathaniel Deering--P. H. Greenleaf--Charles P. Ilsley--Joseph Ingraham--Geo. W. Light--Henry W. Longfellow--Grenville Mellen--Frederick Mellen--Isaac McLellan, Jr.--John Neal--Elizabeth Smith--William Willis--N. P. Willis. Considering the population of our city--hardly fifteen thousand at this time--the list itself we apprehend will be considered as not the least remarkable part of the book.