London: Printed for Henry Brome, 1664. Second edition. Small octavo (162 x 104 mm). 20th-century green morocco, spine with raised bands, compartments lettered and ruled in gilt, gilt frames to covers, board edges and turn-ins ruled in gilt, orange endpapers, edges gilt. Engraved portrait frontispiece, woodcut floriated initials and headpieces. 20th-century bookplate of one Michael James Miscoe to front pastedown, early inscription cancelled from verso of title page. Spine faded to brown, the binding overall firm with the gilt bright, upper edges cut a bit short, without loss of text, intermittent browning and mainly marginal foxing to contents, short closed tear to lower margin of one leaf, otherwise clean. A very good copy, attractively bound. Elizabeth Barrett Browning's own copy of the poems of Alexander Brome, with her ownership inscription dated 1842 to the title page. This copy appeared in the Sotheby, Wilkinson & Hodge auction of EBB’s son “Pen” Browning’s library, 5 May 1913, as lot 420, noting the same dated signature on the title page, though an “old sheep broken” binding (evidently rebound for the buyer at that sale.)

This is the second edition, corrected and enlarged by the author, of Brome's collected poems, containing numerous new pieces and additional preliminary materials. A lawyer by training, Alexander Brome (1620 1666) gained fame as a poet; his drinking songs inspired to the Greek lyric tradition notably gained him the title of "the English Anacreon". Between 1640 and 1660, "Brome composed over 200 poems, including love poems in the cavalier mode, satires attacking the enemies of the king and, later, the Commonwealth government, drinking songs in the Anacreontic tradition, an assortment of occasional poems, translations of epigrams from the Greek and Latin, and other translations" (ODNB). The first collected edition was published in 1661; the present improved edition includes, among the new poems, Brome's epistleTo his Friend Thomas Stanley, Esq., on his Odes andhis Cromwell's Panegyrick, and it is prefixed by additional verses by Charles SteyningsandValentine Oldis in praise of the poet. As Brome, EBB was herself a skilled translator of the Greek poets (see Prometheus Bound, Translated from the Greek of Aeschylus, and Miscellaneous Poems, 1833) and a writer of Greek-inspired poems, such as her Ode to the Swallow, a paraphrasis of Anacreon's ode on the same theme. The year between 1841 and 1842, coinciding with EBB's inscription on this copy, was a prolific one for the writer, who published new poems, translations, and a series of essays on the Greek and English poets on the 1842 issues of Athenaeum. Her letters of this period are almost entirely written to her teacher of Greek, the blind scholar Hugh Stuart Boyd; in the letters, EBB frequently talks about her "true love for Greek poetry" (Kenyon, p. 101), and dwells on the meaning and interpretation of Greek words, discussing how to better translate them into English. The works of Brome, and especially the Greek odes, would have been of interest to EBB at this time of intense reflection on the encounter between the English and Greek poetical traditions. The present book would have also been in her library and perhaps constituting a source of inspiration since Brome was also a noted love poet - when writing her Sonnets from the Portuguese, published in 1850.

Frederic G. Kenyon, The Letters Of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Vol. I, 1898. (Item #5152)