Fine Books & Manuscripts

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Lot 45
  • 45

Coleridge, Samuel Taylor

Estimate
12,000 - 18,000 USD
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Description

  • Coleridge, Samuel Taylor
  • Blessed are ye that sow beside all Waters! A Lay Sermon, addressed to the Higher and Middle Classes, on the existing Distresses and Discontents. London: for Gale and Fenner, 1817.
  • Paper, ink, leather
8vo (224 x 142 mm). Original printed drab wrappers bound in, uncut with some pages unopened. Brown crushed morocco by Zaehnsdorf; front joint rubbed.

Provenance

John Gribbel (bookplate).

Literature

Ashley I, p. 204; Shepherd p. 41; Tinker 696; Wise 37.

Catalogue Note

an extraordinary presentation copy of the first edition, with 12 pages of corrections and additions by Coleridge.

Coleridge provides a fulsome presentation on the wrapper verso beginning "For a provincial lady who requested through a common friend..." then continues with a humorous 4 lines on the haughtiness of Germans and the fact that the lady only wants his name before signing "Bear witness then my hand, that here I underwrite, S T Coleridge, Scribe in verse and prose."

An early Grolier Club exhibition card laid in describes this as the author's copy. Certainly the corrections and additions  are extensive, adding up to 7 lines on one of the 12 pages bearing his hand. On page XX of the introduction (the Allegoric Vision) he changes the printed lines "the breathed tarnish shall I name on the lustre of the pilgrim's eyes" into the final   "that dimness of abstraction which lay on the lustre of the pilgrim's eyes like the flittering tarnish on a silver mirror from the breath of a sigh.." 

An remarkable copy of this rare pamphlet that “bitterly attacked the economic selfishness and laissez-faire attitudes that were tearing Britain apart,'.."(see R. Holmes, Coleridge. Darker Reflections, pp. 447-48).