No one to-day will deny to them a certain bibliographical interest. Nicholls, her husband, some forty years afterwards, with permission to publish whatever I liked from them.

These little note-books were lent to me by Mr. 60-179) were contained in note-books that Charlotte Brontë had handled tenderly when she made her Selection after Emily and Anne had died. The additional poems which form, as may be seen, the larger part of this volume ( pp. It is a curious irony of circumstance that this little volume, which so failed of recognition when that would have heartened its authors beyond measure, now sells, on the rare occasions that it turns up in the sale-rooms, for more money than the whole issue cost Charlotte Brontë and her sisters when they had it published at their own expense. In the space of a year our publisher has disposed but of two copies, and by what painful efforts he succeeded in getting rid of these two, himself only knows.īefore transferring the edition to the trunkmakers, we have decided on distributing as presents a few copies of what we cannot sell and we beg to offer you one in acknowledgment of the pleasure and profit we have often and long derived from your works.-I am, sir, yours very respectfully, Currer Bell.

The consequences predicted have, of course, overtaken us: our book is found to be a drug no man needs it or heeds it.

Sir,- My relatives, Ellis and Acton Bell, and myself, heedless of the repeated warnings of various respectable publishers, have committed the rash act of printing a volume of poems. Only two copies were sold, as we learn from a letter that Currer Bell sent to certain eminent contemporaries-to Tennyson, to Lockhart, to De Quincey, and to others. Charlotte, Emily, and Anne Brontë here courted public favour for the first time. There is no incident in the profoundly pathetic story of the Brontës better known than that of the publication of the poems by the three sisters through the firm of Aylott and Jones of Paternoster Row. Although it cannot be pretended that any one of these is equal to 'The Old Stoic,' that gave so much distinction to the first volume, or to the 'Last Lines,' that were the unforgettable glory of the second, it will scarcely be disputed that these newly printed verses are of profound interest. No less than one hundred and thirty-eight additional poems are included in the present volume. These thirty-nine poems have been reprinted many times, usually at the end of The Professor. There were twenty-two poems in the little volume entitled Poems by Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell, which was the first venture of the three Miss Brontës, and there were yet another seventeen in the Posthumous Poems that Charlotte Brontë printed after Emily's death. The admirer of Emily Brontë and her work has known her poetry up to the present through only some thirty-nine poems.

The Complete Poems by Emily Brontë