[ca. 1846]. Manuscript copy. Two leaves, written in brown ink across three sides, pages numbered 130-2 in manuscript. Tipped into a brown full morocco binding, lettered and decorated in gilt (the lettering noting an autograph letter signed by Emerson to Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, no longer present). A few ink stains, likely original: exceptionally well-preserved.

A rare manuscript copy of one of the Sage of Concord’s most profound and celebrated poems, which combines his radical individualism with Romantic apprehensions of love and nature. The manuscript exhibits half a dozen corrections and three lines vary slightly from the text printed in his debut collection Poems (1847), suggesting this may be a draft version.

The manuscript is here tipped into a brown morocco volume bound for Mary Brooks Picken (1886 - 1981), author of several books on fashion and textiles. (Item #7589)