Divine Songs and Meditacions (1653)Collins, An, active 17th century
Religion
Divine Songs and Meditacions (1653)
Collins, An, active 17th century
Christian poetry, English -- Early modern, 1500-1700; Christian women -- Religious life -- Poetry; Meditations
In 1815, the library of Thomas Park, which had already passed from Park
to Thomas Hill to Longman, was sold. In the catalog of that collection, a
volume of devotional and autobiographical verse written by one Anne
Collins, _Divine Songs and Meditacions_ (1653), was described as “so rare
as to be probably unique.”[1] That same year, Longman and his associates
published an anthology of “Old Books in English Literature, Revived,”
edited by Sir Egerton Brydges and entitled _Restituta_. Brydges, who
acknowledged the help of Park in editing the four volume work,[2]
reprinted long passages from the _Songs and Meditacions_. By mid-century,
the book had passed through the possession of James Midgeley, Sir Mark
Masterman Sykes, Thomas Thorpe,[3] and Richard Heber. In 1878, Alexander
Dyce reprinted all but the last stanza of “Another Song exciting to
spirituall Mirth,” and some twenty years later, S. Austin Allibone
included reference to Anne Collins in his _Critical Dictionary of English
Literature_. By this time, however, the remaining copy of _Divine Songs
and Meditacions_ seems to have slipped from sight; scholars were a long
time finding it, but in 1924, the “unique” copy bearing the autograph of
Thomas Park was removed from the library at Britwell Court and sold by
Sotheby to A. S. W. Rosenbach, who acted in behalf of Henry E.
Huntington, in whose memorial library it now remains. If a second edition
of the work ever existed, as claimed by Allibone,[4] it has vanished (to
my knowledge, without a further trace); for all practical purposes, Anne
Collins and her _Divine Songs and Meditacions_ are unknown even to
scholars of seventeenth-century literature.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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