was preaching of compensations, of friendship, of
society, and of the Oversoul.
Emily Dickinson has by no means lost her
freshness for us; she wears as would an old-
fashioned pearl set in gold and dark enamels.
One feels as if one were sunning in the discal
radiance of a bright, vivid, and really new type
of poet. For with her cheery impertinence she
offsets the smugness of the time in which she
lived. What must have been the irresistible
charm of this girl who gave so charming a por-
trait of herself to the stranger friend who
inquired for a photograph: ‘‘I have no portrait
now, but am small like the wren, and my hair is
bold like the chestnut bur, and my eyes like the
sherry in the glass that the guest leaves!’’ She had
undeniable originality of personality, grace, and
special beauty of mind. It was a charm unique in
itself, not like any other genius then or now, or
in the time before her, having perhaps a little
of relationship to the crystal clearness of
Crashaw—like Vaughan and Donne maybe in
respect to their lyrical fervor and moral earnest-
ness, nevertheless appearing to us freshly with as
separate a spirit in her poetry as she herself was
separated from the world around her by the
amplitude of garden which was her universe.
Emily Dickinson confronts you at once with an
instinct for poetry to be envied by the more
ordinary and perhaps more finished poets. Ordi-
nary she never was; contain she never could have
been. For she was first and last aristocratic in
sensibility, rare and untouchable, often vague
and mystical, sometimes distinctly aloof. Those
with a fondness for intimacy will find her, like all
recluses, forbidding and difficult.
Here was New England at its sharpest, wit-
tiest, most fantastic, most willful, most devout.
Saint and imp sported in her, toying with the
tricks of the Deity, taking them now with
extreme profundity, then tossing them about
like irresistible toys with an incomparable trivi-
ality. She has traced upon the page with celestial
indelibility that fine line from her soul, which is
like a fine prismatic light separating one bright
sphere from another, one planet from another
planet; and the edge of separation is but faintly
perceptible. She has left us this bright folio of
her ‘‘lightning and fragrance in one,’’ scintillant
with star dust as perhaps no other before her,
certainly none in this country. Who has had
her celestial attachedness—or must we call it
detachedness?—and her sublime impertinent
playfulness, which makes her images dance
before one like offspring of the great round
sun, as zealously she fools with the universes at
her feet and, with loftiness of spirit and exquisite
trivialness, with those just beyond her eye?
Whoever has not read these flippant render-
ings, holding always some touch of austerity and
gravity of mood, or the still more perfect ‘‘letters’’
to her friends, has, I think, missed a new kind of
poetic diversion—a new loveliness, evasive, alert,
pronounced in every interval and serious, mod-
estly so, and at a bound leaping as it were like
some sky child pranking with the clouds and the
hills and the valleys beneath them. Child she
surely was always, playing in some celestial gar-
den space in her mind, where every species of
tether was unendurable, where freedom for this
childish sport was the one thing necessary to her
ever young and incessantly capering mind. It
must be said, then, that ‘‘fascination was her ele-
ment’’; everything to her was wondrous, sub-
limely magical, awesomely inspiring and
thrilling. It was the event of many moons to
have someone she liked say so much as ‘‘good
morning’’ to her in human tongue; it was the
event of every instant to have the flowers and
birds call her by name, and hear the clouds exult
at her approach. She was the brightest young
sister of fancy, as she was the gifted young daugh-
ter of the ancient imagination.
One feels everywhere in her verse and in her
letters an unexcelled freshness, a brightness of
metaphor and of imagery, a peculiar girl that
could have come only from this part of our coun-
try, this part of the world, this very spot which has
bred so many intellectual and spiritual entities,
wrapped in the garments of isolation, robed with
questioning. Her genius is in this sense essentially
local, as much the voice of the spirit of New
England as it is possible for one to be.
If ever a wanderer hitched a vehicle to the
comet’s tail, it was this poetic sprite woman; noLIKE ALL ARISTOCRATS, SHE HATED
MEDIOCRITY; AND LIKE ALL FIRST-RATE JEWELS,
SHE HAD NO RIFT TO HIDE. SHE WAS NOT A MAKE
OF POETRY; SHE WAS A THINKER OF POETRY.’’I’m Nobody! Who are you?