A very nice first edition of the excellent poems of one of the quieter of the transcendentalists and anti-slavery, pro-suffrage, social reformers of his age. George Shepard Burleigh [1821-1903] was a well-known, though less oratorically prone friend of many of the great minds in the movements of the time. More sensitive, he found his voice in pen, first editing The Anti-Slavery Hymnal [1842] and then issuing this, his first volume of poetry.

In it, he feels deeply the sting and pain of the world around him. The title poem, The Maniac, is about the plight of the mentally ill. He uses the language of abolition and slavery to marshal the hearts of others to the plight of the "insane" as well. In the poem, the author shows how a paranoid fixation on the horrors of life at the time, starvation, war, injustice, led the maniac to his breakdown. It feels autobiographical. 

A particularly moving anti-slavery stanza is included in the poem on the death of the young abolitionist, Ellen Byrne,

Dark bondman! doomed in chains to pine,
And bleeding from the oppressor's rod,
Mourn, but in hope, - a friend of thine
Hath gone, to plead for thee with God.
When speeding to thy home afar,
The land of refuge to the slave,
Led onward by the Northern star,
One moment bend above her grave,
And wet with grateful tears the urn
Which holds the dust of Ellen Byrne.

Burleigh, George Shepard. The Maniac: and Other Poems. Philadelphia. J. W. Moore. 1849. First Edition. 240pp.

A good + copy, bound in cloth, generally solid, with moderate foxing.