Page:The complete poems of Emily Bronte.djvu/19

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INTRODUCTORY ESSAY ON EMILY BRONTË


I


This volume contains the complete poems of Emily Brontë. Of these twenty-two appeared in the Poems of Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell published in 1846. After the death of Emily Brontë, seventeen poems were published by Charlotte Brontë. These are all derived from a manuscript transcribed in February 1844 by Emily Brontë, and written in microscopic characters. Four were left unprinted by Charlotte Brontë, and are now published. In addition, there was another volume of manuscripts and some small poems written on small slips of paper of various sizes. All of these were unpublished till 1902, when sixty-seven were privately printed by Dodd, Mead and Co. in an edition of only a hundred and ten copies. The rest of this volume, containing seventy-one poems, is here printed for the first time, and in a limited edition. It is not claimed for a moment that the intrinsic

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