FROM TEMPTATION TO SALVATION
BEAUMONT, Joseph.
Psyche: or Loves Mysterie in XX. Canto’s: displaying the Intercourse betwixt Christ and the Soule …
London, Printed by John Dawson for George Boddington, 1648.
Small folio, pp. [6], 399, [1]; text in two columns; bound without the preliminary blank, small hole to M4 affecting three letters, a few marginal repairs without loss; a very good copy in full red morocco, gilt, by Zaehnsdorf; joints slightly rubbed, slight wear to corners.
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Psyche: or Loves Mysterie in XX. Canto’s: displaying the Intercourse betwixt Christ and the Soule …
First edition of this lengthy religious epic representing the journey of the personified Soul from England to the Holy Land and back, written by Beaumont, one of the Royalist fellows ejected from Cambridge in 1644.
Joseph Beaumont (1616–1699), who had been made a fellow of Peterhouse in 1636, devoted his enforced retirement to the composition of this poem, following ‘a Soule led by divine Grace, and her Guardian Angel ... through the difficult Temptations and Assaults of Lust, of Pride, of Heresie, of Persecution, and of Spiritual Dereliction ... to heavenly Felicitie.’ The result, some thirty thousand lines in six-line stanzas, is by far the longest work of the ‘English Spenserians’ of the seventeenth century (Drayton, Wither, Henry More, and Giles and Phineas Fletcher), although Beaumont’s stylistic affinities lie more with Donne and with his fellow student at Peterhouse, Richard Crashaw.
Psyche was reissued in 1651, and a second edition was published in 1702, ‘much enlarged in every canto by the late Reverend Author’.
ESTC R12099; Wing B 1625; Hayward 96.
