Plan your visit. 225 Madison Avenue at 36th Street, New York, NY 10016.

Plan your visit. 225 Madison Avenue at 36th Street, New York, NY 10016.

Letter from William Davies, Warrington, to William Angus Knight, 1863 January 19 : autograph manuscript signed.

BIB_ID
419021
Accession number
MA 9987.5
Creator
Davies, William, active 19th century.
Display Date
Warrington, England, 1863 January 19.
Credit line
Purchased by Pierpont Morgan, 1908.
Description
1 item (4 pages) ; 20.2 x 12.6 cm
Notes
Acquired as part of a large collection of letters addressed to William Angus Knight, Chair of Moral Philosophy at the University of St. Andrews and Wordsworth scholar. Items in the collection have been individually accessioned and cataloged.
Davies gives the place of writing as "Sankey Street / Warrington."
With extensive editorial markings, presumably made by Knight, who quotes from Davies's letters in his "Retrospects" (Smith, Elder & Co, 1904).
This collection, MA 9987, is comprised of twenty-two letters and postcards from William Davies to William Angus Knight, written between 1862 and 1895. See the collection-level record for more information (MA 9987.1-22).
Provenance
Purchased by Pierpont Morgan from William Angus Knight, 1908.
Summary
Thanking him for sending his book; commenting on the binding and saying that he thinks it is in the style of the "Jones, Morris, and Rossetti society who are trying to get at the simplicity in design of the middle ages;" writing of how much he looks forward to seeing Knight in the course of his "Wordsworthian pilgrimage;" recalling a visit to the Lake District as a young boy and the effect it had on him; discussing the depiction of nature in Wordsworth's poetry and comparing him to other poets: "It is Wordsworth's oneness in fact which gives somewhat the aspect of photographs to his pictures - done by a brain-machine rather than by the living hand of a glowing soul, alive to beauty, glory, and loveliness in every direction;" commenting on the question of selling one's intellectual labor.