Her alien and lonely state should have moved Mr. Clement Shorter to a passionate chivalry.  It has not even moved him to revise his proofs with perfect piety.  Perfect piety would have saved him from the oversight, innocent but deplorable, of attributing to Emily Bronte four poems which Emily Bronte could not possibly have written, which were in fact written by Anne:  “Despondency”, “In Memory of a Happy Day in February”, “A Prayer”, and “Confidence."[A] No doubt Mr. Shorter found them in Emily’s handwriting; but how could he, how could he mistake Anne’s voice for Emily’s?

[Footnote A:  Published among Charlotte Bronte’s posthumous “Selections” in 1850.]

  My God (oh let me call Thee mine,
    Weak, wretched sinner though I be),
  My trembling soul would fain be Thine;
    My feeble faith still clings to Thee.

It is Anne’s voice at her feeblest and most depressed.

It is, perhaps, a little ungrateful and ungracious to say these things, when but for Mr. Shorter we should not have had Emily’s complete poems at all.  And to accuse Mr. Shorter of present indifference (in the face of his previous achievements) would be iniquitous if it were not absurd; it would be biting the hand that feeds you.  The pity is that, owing to a mere momentary lapse in him of the religious spirit, Mr. Shorter has missed his own opportunity.  He does not seem to have quite realized the splendour of his “find”.  Nor has Sir William Robertson Nicoll seen fit to help him here.  Sir William Robertson Nicoll deprecates any over-valuation of Mr. Clement Shorter’s collection.  “It is not claimed,” he says, “for a moment that the intrinsic merits of the verses are of a special kind.”  And Mr. Clement Shorter is not much bolder in proffering his treasures.  “No one can deny to them,” he says, “a certain bibliographical interest.”

Mr. Shorter is too modest.  His collection includes one of the profoundest and most beautiful poems Emily Bronte ever wrote,[A] and at least one splendid ballad, “Douglas Ride".[B] Here is the ballad, or enough of it to show how live it is with sound and vision and speed.  It was written by a girl of twenty: 

  What rider up Gobeloin’s glen
    Has spurred his straining steed,
  And fast and far from living men
    Has passed with maddening speed?

  I saw his hoof-prints mark the rock,
    When swift he left the plain;
  I heard deep down the echoing shock
    Re-echo back again.

* * * * *

  With streaming hair, and forehead bare,
    And mantle waving wide,
  His master rides; the eagle there
    Soars up on every side.

  The goats fly by with timid cry,
    Their realm rashly won;
  They pause—­he still ascends on high—­
    They gaze, but he is gone.

  O gallant horse, hold on thy course;
    The road is tracked behind. 
  Spur, rider, spur, or vain thy force—­
    Death comes on every wind.