  We have performed an optical spectroscopic and photometric search for young
stellar objects associated with the molecular cloud Lynds 1340, and examined
the structure of the cloud by constructing an extinction map, based on SDSS
data. The new extinction map suggests a shallow, strongly fragmented cloud,
having a mass of some 3700~Msun. Longslit spectroscopic observations of the
brightest stars over the area of L1340 revealed that the most massive star
associated with L1340 is a B4 type, about 5 solar mass star. The new
spectroscopic and photometric data of the intermediate mass members led to a
revised distance of 825 (+110 /-80) pc, and revealed seven members of the young
stellar population with M > 2 solar masses. Our search for H alpha emission
line stars, conducted with the Wide Field Grism Spectrograph 2 on the 2.2-meter
telescope of the University of Hawaii and covering a 30 arcmin x 40 arcmin
area, resulted in the detection of 75 candidate low-mass pre-main sequence
stars, 58 of which are new. We constructed spectral energy distributions of our
target stars, based on SDSS, 2MASS, Spitzer, and WISE photometric data, derived
their spectral types, extinctions, and luminosities from BVRIJ fluxes,
estimated masses by means of pre-main sequence evolutionary models, and
examined the disk properties utilizing the 2-24 micron interval of the spectral
energy distribution. We measured the equivalent width of the H alpha lines and
derived accretion rates. The optically selected sample of pre-main sequence
stars has a median effective temperature of 3970 K, stellar mass 0.7 Msun, and
accretion rate of 7.6 10^{-9} Msun/yr.
