Description
Autograph Letter Signed ‘C.Swain’, to George Faulkner, welcoming his Journal, thanking him for the kind review of “The Mind &c”, hoping to meet him, etc. 3 pp. 8 x 5 inches, in good condition, with the original envelope. 26 March 1842. “I trust the Journal will make a prosperous voyage, with sails (sales) far spread – until it anchors safely in the full tide of popularity.” Charles Swain (1801–1874), Manchester poet and engraver. Swain experimented with dialogue forms in Dramatic Chapters (1847), Letters of Laura d’Auverne (1853), and Art and Fashion (1863), each of which was the title-poem of more digestible collections of shorter poems. His most readable work is in English Melodies (1849), Songs and Ballads (1867), and the lyrics scattered through earlier volumes. Many of those lyrics, including ‘When the heart is young’, ‘Tapping at the Window’, and ‘I waited in the twilight’, were set to music, some by the poet himself. in 1827 he issued Metrical Essays on Subjects of History and Imagination, dedicated to Charles Tavaré, and in 1831 Beauties of the Mind: a Poetical Sketch with Lays Historical and Romantic, dedicated to Robert Southey, the most notable of Swain’s widening circle of literary friends.[DNB]