Science Revived or The Vision of Alfred A Poem in Eight Books

Rare. Quarto. Paper over boards, large bottom corner stain penetrates board and lightly stains and wrinkles corner of wide margined text, throughout. Heavy rag paper, uncut. Boards are detached. Paper spine is deeply creased and worn, but text block is sound. @ 1" ink splotch above 'Vision' on title page, affecting adjacent frontispiece engraving of the star wreathed Goddess of Science visiting the sleeping poet, surrounded by the spirits of air, her "Sylphs" who lead the poet through time and space. The 'advertisement' explains the author's intent: "In the following Poem I have introduced supernatural agents.dominated (by)Sylphs.a modern invention, whose characters are not yet fixed.The Goddess describes them to be spirits, the shadows or representations of material things." An engraving of the Goddess of Science, reading to cherubs serves as a frontis to the section of "Notes" and references to each book (pp 206-248). The notes span time and imagination. Joseph Sympson (1715-1807) UK minister ? Vicar of Wythburn ? and author, a friend of William Wordsworth (1770-1850), whose son, Joseph Sympson was also a poet. The work is liberally sprinkled with the fairy dust of the Romantic infusion of Nature, Imagination, and Science. A copy of both editions of the work was in Wordsworth's library and is cited by him. The Sympson family is described as intimates in Dorothy's journal; and during the period of "The Excursion", fellow explorers. The Science Fiction Encyclopedia cites the work as follows "The elder Sympson's book-length poem, Science Revived; Or, the Vision of Alfred: A Poem in Eight Books (1802), though essentially a fantasy of history, has some Proto SF interest when the spirit of Alfred the Great is transported to another Star by the Goddess of Science, from which vantage he is allowed to see the future." Due to size or weight, this item may require additional postage for international or priority shipping.