THE SONG OF HIAWATHA

Publisher's dark red cloth, upper cover with gilt pictorial design and titling, smooth spine with gilt lettering. IN THE ORIGINAL BOX with cover design printed on lid (top and bottom of box very expertly repaired at corners). With frontispiece portrait of Longfellow, wood-engraved headpiece vignettes at beginning of each chapter, one or two small wood engravings in the margin of each page, showing the face of a character, specimens of area wildlife, and Native American tools, vessels, and clothing, and 22 photogravure plates after Remington, all with lettered tissue guards.

Front free endpaper with neat ink inscription: Charles S. Davis / Christmas 1913 / from Bessie"; publisher's announcement for Whittier's "Snow-Bound" (1906) laid in. ◆Binding with trivial shelf wear, a couple of faint marginal thumb smudges, but A VERY FINE COPY--clean, fresh, and bright internally, in a virtually unworn binding and the sturdy original box.

Longfellow's epic poem about the Native American "Hiawatha"--a composite of legends, folklore, myth, and characters presented in short, lilting lines--is one of his best-known works. But it received a decidedly mixed reception when first published in 1855. The Boston Traveler, in revealing its (benighted) unwillingness to accept the work's content, said: "We cannot help but express our regret that our own pet national poet should not have selected as a theme of his muse something better and higher than the silly legends of the savage aborigines." Despite this, the poem entered our canon of great narratives, and was revived again in 1891 when Remington, surely the most renowned artist of the West, provided new pen and ink drawings for a deluxe edition. By then a sophisticated practitioner of the grisaille technique, Remington executed 22 black-and-white oil paintings, one for each of the poem's cantos. The present work seems to be a later printing of the 1891 edition, beautifully preserved in the original box and appearing almost as new.