Beschreibung:

BRYANT, WILLIAM CULLEN. Autograph manuscript of his poem "The Death of Slavery" ("Oh thou great Wrong..."), with an autograph letter signed (W.C. Bryant") to James T. Fields submitting the poem to the Atlantic Monthly , Roslyn, Long Island, 5 June 1866. 6 pages, large 8vo (the poem comprising 5 pages), on rectos only of six sheets lined paper, each leaf carefully inlaid to a larger sheet, bound with 2 engraved portraits and the printed text from Bryant's Later Poems in purple levant morocco gilt, covers with gilt borders, titled on upper cover, white watered silk doublures and endpages, t.e.g., rubbed. BRYANT'S POEM CELEBRATING RATIFICATION OF THE THIRTEENTH AMENDMENT A fine Bryant manuscript as submitted for publication in the Atlantic Monthly , comprising seven 12-line stanzas, titled by Bryant at the head of page 1: "The Death of Slavery." In the letter of transmittal to James T. Fields, Bryant states: "I send you a poem some part of which was meditated a year since but written out the last few days. I had a good deal of trouble with some of the stanzas, or you would have had it earlier. You will publish it, if at all, when you please...." In a postscript, he adds: "What shall I call the poem. 'The Death of Slavery' does not please me much but I can think of nothing else." The poem's first stanza reads: "O thou great Wrong, that through the slow-paced years, Didst hold thy millions fettered, and didst wield The scourge that drove the laborer to the field, And turn a stony gaze on human tears," and concludes: " ...there shall the grim block remain At which the slave was sold; while at thy feet Scourges and engines of restraint and pain Moulder and rust by thine eternal seat. There, mid the symbols that proclaim thy crimes, Dwell thou, a warning to the coming times." According to a Bryant scholar, "His poem on the Death of Slavery...was brought forth by the passage of the Constitutional Amendment [ratified in December 1865]..." (Sturges, Chronologies of the Life and Writings of William Cullen Bryant.) Provenance : Elsie O. & Philip D. Sang Foundation (sale, Sotheby Parke Bernet, 20 June 1979, lot 631).