This historic book may have numerous typos, missing text or index. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. 1908. Not illustrated. Excerpt: ... INTRODUCTION George Eliot's earliest literary endeavors, like those of many other great writers of prose, took the form of verse, and the first of her writings to appear in print was a devotional poem written in July, 1839, and published in the Christian Observer for January, 1840, over the signature "M. A. E." The lines may be found in the first volume of their author's Life. She wrote other verse about this time, but there is no evidence that any of it found its way into print. It was not until after she had written prose for many years and had produced some of her greatest novels that she made her first serious attempt at verse, in "The Spanish Gypsy," begun in 1864 and finished in 1868. Sir Leslie Stephen says of her, "She is a remarkable, I suppose unique, case of a writer taking to poetry at the ripe age of fortyfour, by which the majority of poets have done their best work." Most of her shorter poems were written in the ten years between 1864 and 1874. The first of these was the one entitled "A Minor Prophet," which she wrote in January, 1865, when her difficulties with "The Spanish Gypsy" were reaching the point where she found it necessary to lay it aside for the time. This new work doubtless served as an outlet for her baffled energies. She first called the poem "My Vegetarian Friend," and her journal for January 8 records that the matter had been written in prose three or four years earlier. Apparently it was not printed until the poems were collected in "The Legend of Jubal, and Other Poems," published in May, 1874. The title poem of this collection was begun in the autumn of 1869 and finished January 3, 1870. It appeared simultaneously in Macmillan's Magazine and the Atlantic Monthly for May, 1870. Mr. Oscar Brownin...