communication and consultation had been discontinued; hence it
ensued, that we were mutually ignorant of the progress we might
respectively have made.

One day, in the autumn of 1845, I accidentally lighted on a MS.
volume of verse in my sister Emily's handwriting. Of course, I was
not surprised, knowing that she could and did write verse: I
looked it over, and something more than surprise seized me--a deep
conviction that these were not common effusions, nor at all like
the poetry women generally write. I thought them condensed and
terse, vigorous and genuine. To my ear they had also a peculiar
music--wild, melancholy, and elevating.

My sister Emily was not a person of demonstrative character, nor
one on the recesses of whose mind and feelings even those nearest
and dearest to her could, with impunity, intrude unlicensed; it
took hours to reconcile her to the discovery I had made, and days
to persuade her that such poems merited publication. I knew,
however, that a mind like hers could not be without some latent
spark of honourable ambition, and refused to be discouraged in my
attempts to fan that spark to flame.

Meantime, my younger sister quietly produced some of her own
compositions, intimating that, since Emily's had given me pleasure,
I might like to look at hers. I could not but be a partial judge,
yet I thought that these verses, too, had a sweet, sincere pathos
of their own.

We had very early cherished the dream of one day becoming authors.
This dream, never relinquished even when distance divided and