PREFACE. THE name of Sturm has become so naturalized amongst us, that we scarcely remember that the honour of his birth appertains not to our country; and there are few of our native productions so extensively known, so generally applauded, or perused with so much pleasure as that sweet exotic-the REFLECTIONS. To transplant, therefore, at length, though late, another flower from the sacred parterre of this devout and elegant author into the soil of British literature and worship, is a lot, in which, were my reputation and avocations as lofty and brilliant as they are lowly and obscure, I could not otherwise than boast and rejoice. It is not my present purpose to inquire wherefore this office has not been performed earlier, or by a more skilful hand :—it certainly could not be from want of due encouragement of the former work of the same original; since that has attained to a popularity enjoyed by no other production from the stores of German literature, and is almost considered as a standard English work. My task has not, however, been totally unattended by difficulties and in the number of these, that continual recurrence of the same terms and expressions, which, in my opinion, is frequently both energetic and elegant in the original, but which seems so little to accord with the genins of my own language, often painfully obstructed my progress, and rendered it not rarely embarrassing, and not always possible to escape Wrapped up and an irksome uniformity of language. absorbed in the holy earnestness of his meditations and |