Beacon Hill: A Local Poem, Historic and Descriptive. Book I.

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First edition. Quarto. ix, [10 -11], 56pp. String-tied unprinted blue wrappers with ink note on the title page noting "by Mrs. Sarah W. Morton." Very good with spine expertly rebacked, a couple of light stains and chips, creases and tears at the edges of the wrappers; with page fresh and sound. Sarah Wentworth Apthorp Morton (1759-1848), poet and author grew up in Braintree, Massachusetts not far from John and Abigail Adams. Sarah wrote poetry early, but upon her marriage in 1781 to Perez Morton, a Harvard graduate and Boston politician, she turned her energies to her husband and five children. The couple became leading lights of Boston society, in what seemed a charmed life. The illusion was shattered in 1788 when her sister Frances borne Perez s child, and subsequently committed suicide. (The scandal was the basis of his 1789 novel, *The Power of Sympathy* by neighbor, William Hill Brown, and often cited as the first American novel, but oddly enough, attributed to Mrs. Morton for many years.) Sarah refused to allow the tragedy to destroy her family. She began to submit poetry to the *Massachusetts Magazine* under a pen names, followed by her first major poem, *Ouabi: or the Virtues of Nature* in 1790, an Indian tale that forecast her focus on American themes. The ambitious *Beacon Hill* appeared seven years later. In it she gives an epic aura to Boston s role in the Revolutionary War and then enlarges her theme to the 13 colonies. The poem declares: "Assert your rights, which self-supported rise, / Free as the air, and boundless as the skies." *Beacon Hill* sounds themes of individual liberty and responsibility, of patriotic ardor and social protest, and portrays not only a new nation, but a new national identity. Bestandsnummer des Verkäufers 561061

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