Excerpt from My House, Chips the Builder Threw Away In 1845 I published a little volume of poems, written while engaged in my profession of Sculpture. Since then, until the past year or two, the struggle for material existence left lit tle time or strength for literary work. The main part of this book has been written during the past year, the recreation of my leisure hours. The poems are what an artist might call sketches, containing many lines which, in a more serious effort, would have been left out. Such pruning would, however, have destroyed the spontaneity of feeling under which they were written. The reader must, therefore, accept or reject them mainly for the ideas or sentiments which they imperfectly express. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.