I am not joking.  The book must be printed.  We were charmed with the poems.  Some of them have all the quaintness of Herbert, some the simple subjective fervor of the German hymns, and some the glow of Wesley.  They are, as Mrs. R. said, out of the beaten way, and all true.  So they differ from the conventional poetry.  If published, there may be here and there some sentimental soul, or some soul without sentiment, or some critic who doats on Robt.  Browning and don’t understand him, or on Morris, or Rossetti, because they are high artists, who may snub the book.  Very well; for compensation you will have the fact that the poems will win for you a living place in the hearts of thousands—­in a sanctuary where few are permitted to enter.

A day or two later Mr. Randolph wrote in reply to her misgivings: 

If I had the slightest thought that you would make even a slight mistake in publishing, I would say so.  As I have already said, I am sure that the book would prove a blessing in ten thousand ways, and at the same time add to your reputation as a writer.

She could not resist this appeal.  The assurance that the verses would prove a blessing to many souls disarmed her scruples and she consented to their publication.  The most of them, unfortunately, bore no date.  But all, or nearly all of them, belong to the previous twenty years, and they depict some of the deepest experiences of her Christian life during that period; they are her tears of joy or of sorrow, her cries of anguish, and her songs of love and triumph.  Some of them were hastily written in pencil, upon torn scraps of paper, as if she were on a journey.  Were they all accompanied with the exact time and circumstances of their composition, they would form, in connection with others unpublished, her spiritual autobiography from the death of Eddy and Bessie, in 1852, to the autumn of 1873. [8]

As she anticipated, the volume met in some quarters with anything but a cordial reception; the criticisms upon it were curt and depreciatory.  Its representation of the Christian life was censured as gloomy and false.  It was even intimated that in her expressions of pain and sorrow, there was more or less poetical affectation.  Alluding to this in a letter to a friend, she writes: 

I have spoken of the deepest, sorest pain; not of trials, but of sorrow, not of discomfort, but of suffering.  And all I have spoken of, I have felt.  Never could I have known Christ, had I not had large experience of Him as a chastiser....  You little know the long story of my life, nor is it necessary that you should; but you must take my word for it that if I do not know what suffering means, there is not a soul on earth that does.  It has not been my habit to say much about this; it has been a matter between myself and my God; but the results I have told, that He may be glorified and that others may be led to Him as the Fountain of life and of light.