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Hard cover 12mo (measuring 4 1/4 x 6 1/2 inches), bound in vellum parchment, with red titles and artwork to front board, titles in red to spine, top edge gilt, others untrimmed, (xi) 155 pp., First Edition. Engraved artwork to title and two other pages within. Printed on laid paper, the text with a number of decortative initial caps. Condition: Very Good. Ex library with engraved library bookplate , withdrawal stamp and pen notation to front paste down. Library stamp to title page. Some light soiling to the vellum and dusty text block edges. Crease (not a tear) to fore edge of title page. Otherwise, however, the interior pages are clean, tight and bright and hinges in order. Quarter-inch open tear fore-edge p. 5. ***Presentation Copy from the author, William Bell Scott to his friend, Professor John Nichol, "with affectionate remembs... November 1882". PROFESSOR JOHN NICHOL, (1833-1894) was the first Regius Professor of English Language and Literature at the University of Glasgow, and later Professor at the University of Aberdeen, in whose library this volume landed. The son of an academic, Nichol was an accomplished biographer, essayist, literary critic, lecturer and sometime poet. Warm correspondence spanning the 1880's exists between Nichol and Bell (See Memoir of John Nichol, J. Maclehose, Glasgow, 1896) wherein Bell comments on Nichols's The Death of Theistodes and Other Poems which Bell declares "rouse (him) like the sound of a trumpet." The two visited each other in Ayrshire, and Nichol attended Bell's funeral in 1890.**Dedicated to W.M. Rossetti, this volume was published only a day before the demise of D.G. Rossetti, William's bother and Scott's dear friend. Signed presentation copies were despatched to many of his friends of the Pre-Raphaelite circle: C. Rossetti, Swinburne, Holman Hunt, as well as William Morris. Scott's Autobiographical Notes (1892) records the touching notes and verses sent him in thanks by Christina Rossetti and Swinburne; Morris congratulates him on a well-produced book. These missives recognize the mutual loss felt by the group of artists. Scott could not attend Rossetti's funeral , being ill. This volume was, in fact, Scott's valedictory work of poetry, written when he was seventy years old and entering a period of decline due to angina pectoris which severely limited his travel. He would die in November of 1890. Scott records in the Notes that he wrote A Harvest Home "without premeditation and with quite a novel feeling of spontaneity... every line to be employed in its development, came to me as if from memory, they were written down in pencil on pieces of paper I had placed under my pillow the night before." (Vol.2,pp. 303-304.) Watson, 549.
Ref: BAAC 7070
$153.00