Freeman, Enoch W. A Selection of Hymns: including A Few Originals, designed to Aid the Friends of Zion in their Private and Social Worship. Exeter, [NH]: Leonard Russell, 1832. [8890]
Full leather, red leather title label, joints cracked with the front board nearly detached, leather chipped at top of spine. 11.5 cm (4 1/2 x 3 1/4 inches), top corner of first two leaves torn with loss, affecting some words. 288 pp., text complete, lacking all blank free end papers.
Starr, A Baptist Bibliography, Fo1238. The first edition was issued in 1829.
"The work of revival which has been carried forth in this town for more than three years past, and which is still progressing, seems to call for a greater number and a more extensive variety of hymns than are usually found in collections of this kind...Care has been taken to select those hymns which are best adapted to be sung in 'times of refreshing from the presence of the Lord.' It is fondly hoped that this book may be useful as an instrument in exciting and perpetuating those glorious revivals of pure religion which so signally characterize this age in which Zion is breaking forth on every side in songs of praise." - Author's Advertisement.
Enoch Weston Freeman (1798-1835), of First Baptist Church, Lowell, Massachusetts. "This collection of 286 texts was reprinted several times over the next few years, indicating that the revival continued and that the choices Freeman made proved useful. The book's first hymn, one of seven by the compiler, shows in punctuation and typeface, as much as in vocabulary, the tone of urgency that characterized this movement..." - Music & Richardson, "I Will Sing the Wondrous Story", p. 172.
With a signed provenance card from the collection of A. Merril Smoak, Jr., DWS.