Frank Fether Dally
With Illustrations by G. F. Sargent.
London: Published by J. Brown, Week Street. Whittaker and Co. Ave Maria Lane, 1848
In the mid-1800’s, P.T. Barnum proposed to purchase the neglected house where Shakespeare was born and move it to America, motivating the British government to buy it first, restore it and open it to the public. This poem, written for the occasion, praises Britain for coming to its senses. Lauding the home as “the very throne of thought,” Dally envisions the house inhabited by a panoply of Shakespeare’s characters, and visited by poets and other “children of Song.” These spirits’ paeans invoke Shakespeare’s spirit from the tomb and deify him as the source of poetic inspiration. -CP