A number of the poems in this collection, chiefly on nature subjects, were first published at Boston, Massachusetts at the request of the Harvard professor Andrews Norton. The selection was sent to Norton for the use of his own children and he thought so well of them that he had them printed in 1825. In 1834 Hemans decided to have the poems published in Britain adding a further eight more personal to members of her own family, which included such titles as ‘The Child’s First Grief’, ‘Epitaph on Two Brothers’, and ‘Birthday Lines to a Young Child, in Autumn.’ Felicia Dorothea Hemans (1793-1835) was an English poet (who identified as Welsh by adoption). Her ‘works appeared in nineteen individual books during her lifetime. After her death in 1835, they were republished widely, usually as collections of individual lyrics and not the longer, annotated works and integrated series that made up her books. For surviving female poets, such as Caroline Norton and Letitia Elizabeth Landon, Lydia Sigourney and Frances Harper, the French Amable Tastu and German Annette von Droste-Hülshoff, she was a valued model. To many readers she offered a woman's voice confiding a woman's trials; to others, a lyricism consonant with Victorian sentimentality ... [However], despite her illustrious admirers her stature as a serious poet gradually declined, partly due to her success in the literary marketplace. Her poetry was considered morally exemplary, and was often assigned to schoolchildren; as a result, Hemans came to be seen as more a poet for children rather than on the basis of her entire body of work. Schoolchildren in the United States were still being taught "The Landing of the Pilgrim Fathers in New England" in the middle of the twentieth century’. However, her critical reputation has been re-examined in recent years, with her work resuming a role in standard anthologies and in classrooms and seminars and literary studies, especially in the United States.