BYRON, Lord.

£1,750 · Offered by Peter Harrington · No longer available

Hebrew Melodies. First edition, first issue, including Byron's most famous and celebrated lyric, "She Walks in Beauty". The thirty poems were largely created by Byron to accompany music composed by Isaac Nathan, adapted from Jewish chants used in contemporary synagogue services. This copy is unrestored in its original wrappers.Byron wrote most of the poems in Hebrew Melodies between 1814 and 1815, around the time of his marriage to Anne Milbanke, though "She Walks in Beauty" was written about Anne Wilmot, the wife of his cousin Sir Robert Wilmot. Byron had met her at a party, as his friend James Webster recalls: "I did take him to Lady Sitwell's party in Seymour Road. He there for the first time saw his cousin, the beautiful Mrs Wilmot. When we returned to his rooms in Albany, he said little, but desired Fletcher [his valet] to give him a tumbler of Brandy, which he drank at once to Mrs Wilmot's health, then retired to rest, and was, I heard afterwards, in a sad state all night. The next day he wrote those charming lines upon her - She walks in beauty like the Night" (quoted in Stewart, p. 91).This copy has the four-line notice of Samuel Rogers's Jacqueline: A Tale on the verso of E4 (omitted in the second issue) and Thomas Campbell's Selected Beauties of English Poetry advertised as "In the Press". It retains the half-title and four final leaves of half-titles and titles for binding Byron's poems issued to date in two volumes.

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