Snow-Bound: A Winter Idyl.

WHITTIER, John Greenleaf.

Item Number: 82341

Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1866.

First edition, first state with p. 52 numbered at foot of this poetic description of the pleasant isolation of “the inmates of the family at the Whittier homestead.” Octavo, original purple cloth, upper cover and spine lettered in gilt, engraved portrait frontispiece, illustrated title page. From the library of Jean Hersholt with his bookplate, near fine. Hersholt was a Danish actor who lived in the United States, where he was a leading film and radio talent, best known for his 17 years starring on radio in Dr. Christian and for playing Shirley Temple’s grandfather in Heidi. Housed in a custom half morocco clamshell box.

“Whittier is the voice of the middle 19th-century New England farmer and small town dweller. In loving, careful detail he speaks for the inarticulate, for the humble and the common” (Kunitz & Haycraft, 813). In his introduction to Snow-Bound, Whittier writes, “The inmates of the family at the Whittier homestead, who are referred to in the poem, were my father, mother, my brother and two sisters, and my uncle and aunt both unmarried. In addition, there was the district schoolmaster who boarded with us.” Snow-Bound was greeted with many favorable reviews that focused on the simplicity and power of Whittier’s writing. The reviewer for The North American Review writes, “We are indebted again to Mr. Whittier, as we have been so often before, for a very real and very refined pleasure. It is true to nature and local coloring, pure in sentiment, quietly deep in feeling, and full of those simple touches that show the poetic eye and the trained hand.” Another reviewer acknowledged that “Whittier is a poet who deserves to be better known… He might be called the poet of the bright side of human nature.” Allibone, 2704. BAL 21862.