PREFACE
The Author of these poems, Martha Lavinia Hoffman, was born in Jackson Valley, Amador County, California, July 21, 1865.
When three years of age her parents moved to Ukiah, California, where her girlhood and young womanhood were spent, and where she received inspiration from the beauties of nature in that, and adjacent valleys, for many of her poems.
From childhood she evinced an unusual love for the true and the beautiful.
When fourteen years of age she was stricken with a severe attack of inflammatory rheumatism which left her in frail health and terminated in her death, from consumption, at the age of thirty-five; but her spirit rose above the sufferings of the frail body and made her the joy and the life of the family.
To her mother she was devoted and the two were the closest companions and intimate friends.
One thought seemed at times to burden her mind and cast a shadow over her otherwise sunny nature and that was, that she was hindered by frail health from doing the good that her heart prompted her to.
A short time before her death she said to her mother and sisters: "I want my poems collected and printed, they may do some good, and you know it is the only way I have of doing good in the world."
And so we dedicate this little volume to those who read, hoping that some thought in it may touch the heart and lift it to a nearness with the Divine, the source of all that is true and beautiful and good, and that our darling sister who fell asleep so peacefully and with such sweet content may some day gather an abundant harvest of precious sheaves to lay at the feet of the Saviour she loved.
A SISTER.
