Author: WILLIAM ROWAN HAMILTON
Title: Sonnets to the Queen on Her Accession.
Description: Manuscript, 1849. 8 pages, 360 x 260 mm. The sonnet is written out in manuscript on one page with the author's initials bottom right. The first page has the decorative initials L.G.S. for Letitia Sarah Georgina Sadleir [1813 - 67], of Castleton, Ireland. She has also written a note opposite the poem identifying its author. "These verses are in the handwriting of the celebrated Sir William Rowan Hamilton, the distinguished astronomer, by whom they were composed." William Rowan Hamilton [1805 - 65] was an Irish mathematician, astronomer, and physicist, as well as a poet. He made important reformulations of Newtonian physics, now known as Hamiltonian physics. He met William Wordsworth a number of times and sent him numerous poems, becoming a "poetic disciple." He also visited Samuel Taylor Coleridge at Highgate in 1832. Although his biographies mention his poetry, apart from a single leaf entitled The Rydal Hours [1832] I can find no record of any having been published. Wordsworth obviously believed that his talents would be better employed in the pursuit of science writing to him "You send me showers of verses which I receive with much pleasure... yet have we fears that this employment may seduce you from the path of science.... Again I do venture to submit to your consideration, whether the poetical parts of your nature would not find a field more favourable to their nature in the regions of prose, not because those regions are humbler, but because they may be gracefully and profitably trod, with footsteps less careful and in measures less elaborate."

Keywords: Manuscript


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