olate, who, in times of bereavement, love to linger among the "graves of their household," and dwell upon the state of the departed. These "Voices from the Silent Land" have been collected in the freshness of a very deep affliction, and completed before its daily-gushing anguish had passed away. The compiler's aim and object is to induce some to make a good and wise use of afflictive dispensations, to see the hand of God in them all, and to feel that "the Judge of all the earth will do right." She can only desire that the perusal of these pages may prove as sweet and soothing a source of consolation to others as their preparation has been to herself. The women of the United States, however elevated and affluent their station, are rarely entirely free from the perplexities and anxieties of domestic cares, and can seldom find sufficient leisure to peruse or examine all the works from which this volume has been gathered; therefore it is designed more particularly for my countrywomen whom God, in infinite wisdom, may have caused to pass under the rod of affliction, but who, I trust, can say, with the poet, ""Tis sweet, as year by year we lose Friends out of sight, in faith to muse May 10, 1851. M. N. W. NOTE. THE Compiler would express her grateful acknowledgments to Mrs. Julia Norton, Messrs. W. C. Bryant, H. W. Longfellow, N. P. Willis, Park Benjamin, Charles Sprague, J. T. Fields, and others, for kindly granting her permission to publish the articles, which appear in this volume, from their pens. |