Beschreibung:

BRYANT, WILLIAM CULLEN. Autograph manuscript signed, a fair copy of the final portion of his poem "Thanatopsis," with an autograph letter signed to C.B. Tillinghast, New York, 5 March 1868. Each one page, 8vo, on identical sheets of lined paper. (2) In the letter, Bryant responds to a request from his correspondent: "On the other leaf of this sheet you will find a copy of the lines for which you ask. I cannot tell you where to find a good photographic likeness of myself unless it be at Sarony's [the famed portrait photographer]..." The fair copy quotation which Bryant obligingly supplies comprises the final nine lines from Bryant's famous "Thanatopsis": "So live, that when thy summons come to join The innumberable caravan which moves To the mysterious realm where each shall take His chamber in the silent halls of Death, Thou go not like the quarry slave at night. Scourged to his dungeon, but, sustained and soothed By an unfaltering trust, approach thy grave Like one who wraps the drapery of his couch About him, and lies down to pleasant dreams." "Thanatopsis," written when Bryant was 15 years of age and first published in The North American Review in September 1817, enjoyed such widespread success that it became, according to some commentators, "the first great American poem" (Herbert Cahoon, Thomas V. Lange and Charles Ryskamp, American Literary Autographs , 1977, p.16). Although the poem remained celebrated throughout Bryant's life, , autograph fair copies are surprisingly rare: American Book Prices Current records, since 1960, the sale of only one such manuscript, a full fair copy dated 1874, from the library of Marjorie Wiggin Prescott (sale, Christie's, 6 February 1981, lot 35).