INTRODUCTORY NOTE,

BY THE EDITORS OF THE NEW YORK OBSERVER.

IN the year 1837 the signature of IRENEUS first appeared on the pages of the New York Observer. The writer was then a pastor in the Highlands of the Hudson. In the month of April, 1840, he became one of its editors, and has been writing in it, with brief intervals, every week for more than forty years. He has established such relations with his readers that he has come to regard them as personal friends, and he has received abundant assurance that this feeling is reciprocated.

Requests, many and earnest, have been made by our subscribers for the collection of these letters into a volume. "Travels in Europe and the East," "Switzerland,” “The Alhambra and the Kremlin,' Under the Trees" and "Walking with God," are the names of books originally published as Irenæus Letters" in this paper. But this volume contains a selection of more familiar, household letters, such as have been specially mentioned by our readers as giving them pleasure, and it is now published in compliance with their repeated requests to have this in this permanent form.

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