[Charlotte Bronte (as Currer Bell) to the Editor of the Dublin University Magazine, 6 October 1845:] 'I thank you in my own name and that of my brothers, Ellis [Emily Bronte] and Acton [Anne Bronte], for the indulgent notice that appeared in your last number of our first humble efforts in literature; but I thank you still more for the essay on Modern poetry which preceded it -- an essay in which seems to me to be condensed the very spirit of truth and beauty; if all or half of all your other readers shall have derived from its perusal the delight it afforded to myself and my brothers, your labours have produced a rich result. 'After such criticism an author may indeed be smitten at first by a sense of his own insignificance -- as indeed we were -- but on a second and a third perusal he finds a power and beauty therein which stirs him to a desire to do more and better things -- it fulfils the right end of criticism -- without absolutely crushing -- it corrects and rouses'.