The Celestial Country; From the Rythm of Saint Bernard of Cluny
New York: Edwin S. Gorham, 1900. Stitched in original gilt blue cloth (5 3/4 inches tall), 20 pages. Early owner signature. About Fine. Item #1849
"THE FEELING OF HEAVENLY HOMESICKNESS HAS NEVER BEEN EXPRESSED WITH MORE THRILLING POWER OF INTENSITY THAN IN THIS GRAND MEDIEVAL POEM"
Edwin S. Gorham edition of "The Celestial Country"—John Mason Neale's translation of the Latin "rythm" of Bernard of Cluny's De Contemptu Mundi (Contempt of the World). Illustrated by Blanche MacManus with a title page Angel (with her initials "BMcM" in the block) and a Cherub, both printed in a reddish orange. OCLC lists a single physical holding of this volume, at Harvard.
"The most notable contribution of the Tractarian Movement to English hymnody was not its original compositions, but its translations" (Arthur Pollard). With a special talent for the translation of ancient hymns, John Mason Neale enriched the devotional life of the Church of England. "Time and again the hymns which Neale chose to translate were hymns which pointed the worshipper to the glory and adoration of heaven" (Geoffrey Rowell).
"The most famous of all the translations is Neale's extract from Bernard of Cluny's De Contempu Mundi and especially that part we know as Jersusalem the Golden" (Pollard). A Prefatory Note (E.W. / Feast of St. Matthew) which concludes with a biographical note relating "all we know of the author." Also known as Bernard of Morlaix (after his place of birth), Bernard of Cluny was a medieval Benedictine poet and hymnist. His satiric attack of contemporary corruption is "one of the most remarkable of the Latin hymns introduced to popular notice."
Typical of the Anglo-Norman moralizing poetry, Contempt of the World is "a mordant and bitter satire upon the decline of the monastic ideal." First published in 1865, in his skilled hands "there comes the unalloyed jubilation of Neale's vision of the 'sweet and blessed country, the home of God's elect. He visualizes and almost blinding 'radiancy of glory" (Alfred Pollard). Arthur Pollard. English Hymns (Writers and Their Work, No 123); Geoffrey Rowell. The Vision Glorious.The Catholic Revival in Anglicanism; Rosemary Woolf. English Religious Lyric in the Middle Ages.
Price: $100.00