one ever rode the sky and the earth as she did in
this radiant and sky-bright mind of hers. She
loved all things because all things were in one
way or another bright for her, and of a blinding
brightness from which she often had to hide her
face. She embroidered all her thoughts with
starry intricacies, and gave them the splendor
of frosty traceries upon the windowpane, and
of the raindrop in the sun, and summered them
with the fragrancing of the many early and late
flowers of her own fanciful conjuring. They are
glittering garlands of her clear, cool fancies,
these poems, fraught in some instances, as are
certain finely cut stones, with an exceptional
mingling of lights coursing swiftly through
them. She was avid of starlight and of sunlight
alike, and of that light by which all things are
illuminated with a splendor not their own
merely, but lent them by shafts from that radiant
sphere which she leaned from, that high place in
her mind.
To think of this poet is to think of crystal,
for she lived in a radianced world of innumerable
facets, and the common instances were chariots
upon which to ride wildly over the edges of
infinity. She is alive for us now in those rare
fancies of hers. You will find in her all that is
winsome, strange, fanciful, fantastic, and irresis-
tible in the Eastern character. She is first and best
in lightsomeness of temper, for the Eastern is
known as an essentially tragic genius. She is in
modern times perhaps the single exponent of the
quality of true celestial frivolity. She was like
dew and the soft summer rain, and the light
upon the lips of flowers of which she loved to
sing. Her mind and her spirit were one, soul and
sense inseparable. She was the little sister of
Shelley, and the more playful relative of Francis
Thompson. She had about her the imperishable
quality that hovers about all things young and
strong and beautiful; she conveyed the sense of
beauty ungovernable. What she has of religious
and moral tendencies in nowise disturbs those
who love and appreciate true poetic essences.
For Emily Dickinson had in her eyes the
climbing lances of the sun; she had in her heart
love and pity for the immeasurable, innumer-
able, pitiful, and pitiable things. She was a
quenchless mother in her gift for solace. Like
all aristocrats, she hated mediocrity; and like
all first-rate jewels, she had no rift to hide. She
was not a maker of poetry; she was a thinker of
poetry. She was not a conjuror of words so much
as a magician in sensibility. She had only to see
and feel and hear to be in touch with all things
with a name or with things that must be forever
nameless. If she loved people, she loved them for
what they were; if she despised them, she
despised them for what they did, or for lack of
power to feel they could not do. Silence under a
tree was a far more talkative experience with her
than converse with one or a thousand dull
minds. Her throng was the air, and her wings
were the multitude of flying movements in her
brain. She had only to think and she was amid
numberless minarets and golden domes; she had
only to think and the mountain cleft its shadow
in her heart.
Emily Dickinson is in no sense toil for the
mind unaccustomed to the labors of reading: she
is too fanciful and delicious ever to make heavy
the head; she sets you to laughter and draws a
smile across your face for pity and lets you loose
again amid the measureless pleasing little
humanities. I shall always want to read Emily
Dickinson, for she points her finger at all tire-
some scholasticism, and takes a chance with the
universe about her and the first poetry it offers at
every hand, within the eye’s easy glancing. She
has made poetry memorable as a pastime for the
mind, and sent the heavier ministerial tendencies
flying to a speedy oblivion. What a child she was,
child impertinent, with a heavenly rippling in her
brain!
These random passages from her writings
will show at once the rarity of her tastes and
the originality of her phrasing:
February passed like a kate, and I know
March... Here is the light the stranger said
was not on sea or land—myself could arrest
it, but will not chagrin him.
The wind blows gay today, and the jays bark
like blue terriers.
Friday I tasted life, it was a vast morsel... A
circus passed the house—still I feel the red in
my mind though the drums are out.
If I read a book, and it makes my whole body
so cold no fire will ever warm me, I know that is
poetry. If I feel physically as if the top of my
head were taken off, I know that is poetry. Is
there no other way?
None but a Yankee mind could concoct
such humors and fascinatingly pert phrases as
are found here. They are like the chatterings of
the interrupted squirrel in the tree-hole. There is
so much of high gossip in these poetic turns of
hers that throughout her books one finds a mul-
titude of playful tricks for the pleased mind toI’m Nobody! Who are you?