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D. APPLETON & COMPANY, 443 & 445 BROADWAY,

EX9869
P&W T

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ENTERED, according to Act of Congress, in the year 1963,

BY JOSEPH LYMAN,

In the Clerk's Office of the District Court for the District of Massachusetts.

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SOON after this Memoir was commenced, in the spring of 1861, it became evident that the original plan of publishing a single small volume would serve to present hardly a sketch of Mr. Parker's varied and useful life. At the same time, the biographical material, principally in the form of letters, began to increase in such a way that the plan was insensibly enlarged, and the publication from time to time postponed. These delays fortunately coincided with a season of great dulness in the literary market, when the events of the War were absorbing every mind.

As the mass of letters which existed among Mr. Parker's papers became slowly reduced to a sequence of time and to alphabetical order, so that the subjects discussed and the names and qualities of the writers could be seen, it was plain how much important matter from his own hand remained yet uncollected from every part of the country and from the Old World. This index of correspondence registered, by the surest and most delicate of tests, his diffused and latent life. It was worth while to spend a good many months in obeying such directions -to bid the man rise from beneath these sumptuous epitaphs of love, reverence, and human dependence.

This has been done to the extent which these volumes will show. No friend of Mr. Parker will regret the laborious delay which has recalled so many expressions of his mind upon such varied themes.

VOL. I.

250583

The distribution of these letters conforms to the method of the memoir, which could not be a chronological one without greatly confusing the subjects covered by his life. To do justice to each subject, and develope his thought thereon, and to preserve distinctness of effect, the memoir remands into groups, as far as possible, the elements of his manifold career. The order of time is preserved in the narrative of his material and mental growth to full manhood and consciousness of the work he had in hand, and wherever else it can be done without running together too many themes.

The Journal is a collection of a dozen manuscript volumes, some of them bulky ledgers, which are thickly sown with extracts, analyses of books, notifications of thinking. They would be called commonplace-books were it not for the vein of his private life which occasionally appears at the surface, and for the fact that his book-reading and note-making are really personal; for they grow with his growth in a most simple and organic way. The diaristic matter makes a small portion of the whole contents of these volumes. I have given all of it that contributes to a knowledge of his life.

Besides the collection which I have called "The Journal," there are several little pocket note-books, out of which something has been gleaned, principally from those which he used during his last journeyings. But the few passages that are found in a condition to print appear as from "The Journal."

Wherever a citation occurs from his printed works, it is made from the only uniform American edition that has appeared. Many of the foot-notes would be trivial or superfluous except for the English and foreign reader, for whose benefit they were inserted. It is difficult to anticipate where a foreign reader might need a note or explanation; sometimes I may have exceeded, sometimes fallen short of, the natural requisition.

His brother, Isaac Parker; his nephew, Columbus Greene; and other persons, have most kindly furnished recollections of different portions of his life, chiefly of his boyhood. And his friends have freely rendered up the precious letters which they had in keep

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