The Scholar-Gipsy and Thyrsis.
"Here will I sit and wait, While to my ear from uplands far away The bleating of the folded flocks is borne, With distant cries of reapers in the corn– All the live murmur of a summer's day": First edition of Matthew Arnold's The Scholar-Gipsy and Thyrsis
The Scholar-Gipsy and Thyrsis.
ARNOLD, Matthew.
$100.00
Item Number: 124356
London: Macmillan and Co., Limited, 1906.
First edition of this collection of two of Arnold’s most notable works. Octavo, original cloth stamped in gilt, with illustrations by E. H. New including tissue-guarded frontispiece. In near fine condition.
English poet and cultural critic Matthew Arnold published his first book of poetry, The Strayed Reveller, in 1849 and his second volume of poems, Empedocles on Etna, and Other Poems in 1852. A sage writer, he was elected Professor of Poetry at Oxford in 1857, and he was the first in this position to deliver his lectures in English rather than in Latin. Based on on a 17th-century Oxford story found in Joseph Glanvill's The Vanity of Dogmatizing, The Scholar-Gipsy has often been called one of the best and most popular of Arnold's poems, and is also familiar to music-lovers through Ralph Vaughan Williams' choral work An Oxford Elegy, which sets lines from this poem and from its companion-piece, "Thyrsis".
