War-Lyrics and other Poems

Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1866. First edition. Inscribed by the author to Harriet Beecher Stowe. Original cloth, spotted, worn at extremities. With the bookplate of W. Alfred Cave, Rector of St. Mary's Episcopal in Nebraska City, Iowa, who (according to an article in the Circleville, Iowa Herald, for March 7, 1929, which describes this book), possessed a private library of over 6000 volumes. War-Lyrics includes his best poems, "The River Fight" and "The Bay Fight" which deal with the naval actions at New Orleans and Mobile Bay. Stowe herself wrote of Brownell "We regret that the limits of our sketches do not allow us to do justice to those wonderful, inspiring, romantic scenes by which our navy gained possession of New Orleans and Mobile. But if one wants to read them in poetry, terse and vivid, with all the fire of poetry and all the explicitness of prose, we beg them to read the ‘River Fight,' and ‘Bay Fight,' of Henry Brownell," (Stowe, "Men of Our Times" 1868). And Thomas Bailey Aldrich wrote: "[Brownell] is really the only poet produced by the War. His mother was Rebellion and his father Loyalty. Our other singers had earlier and gentler parentage. The flame in his verse was lighted at the mouth of the "Hartford's" cannon. He has two or three poems, to have written which seems to me nearly as fine a thing to have captured two or three towns." (From a letter to T.W Higginson, in our possession.).