[Rarebooks] FS: SIGNED Quotation by Longfellow from his Important Translation of Dante's DIVINE COMEDY

[Charles Agvent]

LONGFELLOW, Henry Wadsworth. AUTOGRAPH QUOTATION SIGNED from 
Longfellow's Translation of Dante's DIVINE COMEDY. n.p., n.d.  On a 6" x 
9" endpaper removed from an early printing of a volume of Longfellow's 
translation of Dante's DIVINE COMEDY, the poet has written the first 3 
lines of Canto III from the poem and has SIGNED "Henry W. Longfellow" at 
the conclusion: "I enter, and I see thee in the gloom/Of the long 
aisles, O poet Saturnine!/And strive to make my steps keep pace with 
thine."  Chipping to the edges of the somewhat fragile paper but with no 
effect at all on Longfellow's writing which is dark and bold.  Near Fine.

On 9 July 1861 while Longfellow was napping, his wife Fanny accidentally 
lit her dress on fire.  Longfellow tried to smother the flames first 
with a rug and then with his body, but the burns were fatal and Fanny 
died the next morning.  Longfellow was burned badly enough that he was 
unable to attend her funeral and thereafter wore a beard which became 
his trademark.  After Fanny's death, the poet took refuge in translating 
Dante's DIVINE COMEDY, a task that would occupy much of his time for the 
next several years.  To assist him in the translation, he invited 
friends--William Dean Howells, James Russell Lowell, Charles Eliot 
Norton and other occasional guests--to weekly meetings of "The Dante 
Club."  Longfellow's translation, the first by an American, was 
published in 1867 and revised by him at later dates. (#017700)     $1,500.00

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