Snow-Bound. A Winter Idyl.

WHITTIER, John Greenleaf.

$400.00

Item Number: 139441

Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1866.

First edition, first issue of this poetic description of the pleasant isolation of “the inmates of the family at the Whittier homestead” with the final page properly numbered 52. Octavo, original cloth with gilt titles and tooling to the spine, pale yellow endpapers, tissue-guarded frontispiece portrait and title page vignette, headpiece and initial letter by Harry Fenn. BAL 21862. In near fine condition. Rear endpaper clipped. Housed in a custom clamshell and folding chemise case.

“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.