Adonais.

This copy of Adonais was the first UK edition, and second overall. It was printed in 1829, eight years after the death of John Keats, to whom this elegy is dedicated.

Keats and Shelley were introduced by a mutual friend in London in 1816. They began with a fairly tenuous friendship built upon both mutual admiration and rivalry. Yet the pair continued to exchange letters and when Shelley moved to Pisa with his wife (the eminent Mary Shelley), he invited Keats to stay with them upon the news of his failing health. As Keats made his way to their Italian home, he stopped in Rome to recuperate from the journey, however the final stages of tuberculosis were upon now upon him and he succumbed to the illness. Despite the morbid diagnosis, many of Keats' friends and contemporaries attributed his death to a scathing review of his poem Hyperion by anonymous critic in the Quarterly Review, which destroyed his spirit. In his poem Don Juan, Byron writes ''Tis strange the mind, that very fiery particle / Should let itself be snuffed out by an article.'

By June 1821, a mere five months after the death of his friend, Shelley published Adonais in Pisa. Shelley bemoaned his grief at the loss of a poet he respected so highly, before urging the reader not to think only of Keats in death, but to remember his life and work. Its British reprint in 1829 was an almost identical copy of the first edition, this one also containing the preface which condemns the critic who caused such suffering to the poet. The Cambridge reprint of the work is often viewed as beings scarcer than the Pisan one (W.M. Rosetti) and remains one of history's most prominent elegies. Only a year later upon the death of Shelley, some of his ashes were scattered alongside Keats' grave in Rome.

This particular copy is finely bound by Roger de Coverly, who was a celebrated binder of the Nineteenth Century and worked under Zaehnsdorf before beginning his own company is 1870 where he was commissioned several times by William Morris.

Firste UK edition; 8vo; slightly toned and foxed; 19th-century dark blue straight-grained morocco gilt by Roger de Coverly, inner dentelles gilt, all edges gilt, marbled endpapers, sunning to spine and top quarter of boards; very good.