Harp of Israel, The.
Rebecca Gratz’s Copy
[Gratz, Rebecca]. Livermore, Harriet. The Harp of Israel. To meet the loud echo in the wilds of America. Philadelphia: Printed for the Authoress by J. Rakestraw, 1835.
12mo.; first signature severely browned, else pages bright; light wear to endpapers; green cloth, spine stamped in gilt. In a specially made quarter-morocco slipcase.
First edition of this work by Livermore, described on the title page as “a mourning pilgrim, bound to the promised land.” A wonderful association copy, linking the author to the most prominent Jewess of her time. A presentation copy, inscribed on the first blank: Rebecca Gratz/ Remember me with kindness/ Harriet/ Phila Dec. 1835. Signed by Gratz on the rear blank, R. H. Gratz.
Singerman 0600, incorrectly transmitting the title as The Harp of Judah, calls this “poems and verse on the Second Advent and the restoration of Israel, together with the American Indians as the Lost Tribes, in Jerusalem.” Elizabeth F. Hoxie explains the impetus for this volume, Livermore’s third book:
When assiduous study of the Bible convinced her the millennium was at hand, Harriet Livermore in 1832 traveled thousands of miles, mostly through wild country, to Fort Leavenworth, Kans., to seek out the Indians, whom she identified with the lost tribes of Israel; but the authorities at the fort thwarted her missionary efforts. From this experience came The Harp of Israel…” (NAW, p. 410).
Soon after its publication, Livermore “decided to await the Lord’s coming in Jerusalem,” making the first of five journeys to the Holy Land.
A devout, if eccentric, evangelist, Harriet Livermore (1788-1868) was immortalized by John Greenleaf Whittier in “Snow-Bound” as “a woman tropical, intense/ in thought and act, in soul and sense/ she blended in a like degree/ the vixen and the devotee.” After her fiancée called off their wedding under pressure from his conservative parents, the captivating socialite daughter of a Massachusetts state supreme court justice saw this as divine punishment for her free-spirited ways and turned her attention to religious inquiry. Hoxie writes,
She had been born an Episcopalian; now she vacillated between Congregationalism and Quakerism, was received into the Baptist Church by immersion, and finally, after a breakdown in 1824, became and remained a ‘solitary eclectic,’ a self-termed ‘Pilgrim Stranger.’ From her Bible readings came her first book, Scriptural Evidence in Favor of Female Testimony in Meetings for the Worship of God (1824)…(NAW, p. 410)
Other works followed: A Narration of Religious Experience (1826); The Harp of Israel (1835); A Testimony of the Times (1843); and Thoughts on Important Subjects (1864). John Quincy Adams, who had joined members of Congress in appreciating her words and voice when she preached to them in January 1827 and after, wrote in 1842 that she had devoted the small funds she had to publishing “books which nobody will purchase or read.”
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