EPHEMERIDES; OR OCCASIONAL POEMS

First edition: 220 pages, foxing throughout, half polished calf with marbled boards, matching marbled end papers and edges, book plate on front paste-down end paper, decorative gilt on the spine, a very good copy.

Mendelssohn (Sidney) South African Bibliography, Volume 2 page 186, 'The first published collection of Pringle 's poetical works. The Scottish poems were written before the poet's departure for Africa, and copious notes, especially on the South African subjects, are annexed. Many contemporary authors, Coleridge among the number, greatly commended the little volume, which is unique in its poetical description of scenes in South Africa, about which little was known up to the time of the publication of the volume.'

EBSCO (https://www.ebsco.com/research-starters/history/thomas-pringle), 'Thomas Pringle (1789-1834), the son of a farmer, was born in 1789 in Blaiklaw, Roxburghshire, Scotland. In his youth he attended the Kelso Grammar School, northwest of Blaiklaw. In 1805 he entered Edinburgh University, where he met the author Sir Walter Scott. After working as a clerk for the Scottish commissioner of public records in Edinburgh, he began coediting the Edinburgh Monthly Magazine (which would later become Blackwood’s Magazine in 1817 and Constable’s Magazine. On July 19, 1817, Pringle married Margaret Brown, and he published his first book of poems, The Autumnal Excursion, two years later.

'In February, 1820, when he was thirty years old, Pringle and Margaret, along with Pringle’s brother, father, and stepmother, Margaret’s sister, and other travelers, left Scotland for South Africa, arriving at Eildon Kloof on June 29. Two years later, in September,1822, after the group had established their community, Pringle relocated to Cape Town and became a government librarian. Within two years, he had opened a school and become coeditor of the South African Commercial Advertiser.

'His reform stances led to the censorship of some of his publications, and in 1826 Pringle departed South Africa, resettling in London. There he devoted himself to writing and to antislavery efforts; he served as secretary for the Society for the Abolition of Slavery until his death eight years later. Two years after his arrival in London, he published a second collection of poems, Ephemerides, and several of his poems appeared in George Thompson’s Travels and Adventures. Poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge praised Pringle’s poem “Afar in the Desert,” considering it one of the best lyric poems in English. His African Sketches, published in 1834, recalled the writer’s six years in South Africa. Despite his relatively brief residence there, Pringle has been called the father of South African poetry in English'.

Fandom (https://pennyspoetry.fandom.com/wiki/Thomas_Pringle#:~:text=Several%20of%20the%20lyrics%20in%20_Ephemerides), 'Several of the lyrics in Ephemerides are described by critics as "graceful and melodious", particularly the Scottish songs and Border ballads that draw on the folk traditions Pringle knew from childhood. The collection includes the first book publication of "Afar in the Desert", the poem that prompted Samuel Taylor Coleridge to write to Pringle declaring it, with small changes, "among the two or three or four most perfect lyric poems in our language."
'The young Alfred Tennyson was sufficiently moved by the collection to write to Pringle in 1832, praising "The Nameless Stream" and observing: "The man who could write it will not flow an altogether nameless stream through the nineteenth century."'