For whom I robbed the dingle,
For whom betrayed the dell,
Many will doubtless ask me,
But I shall never tell!
Yet we are all free to guess—and what flower—at least in the early year, before it has gained that touch of confidence which it acquires later—is so bashful, so pretty, so flushed with rosy shame, so eager to defend its modesty by closing its blushing petals when carried off by the despoiler—as the spring beauty? To be sure, she is not “hidden in her leaflets,” although often seeking concealment beneath the leaves of other plants—but why not assume that Miss Dickinson has availed herself of something of the license so freely granted to poets—especially, it seems to me—to poets of nature? Perhaps of this class few are more accurate than she, and although we wonder at the sudden blindness which leads her to claim that
—Nature rarer uses yellow
Than another hue—
when it seems as though it needed but little knowledge of flowers to recognize that yellow, probably, occurs more frequently among them than any other color, and also at the representation of this same nature as
—Spending scarlet like a woman—
when in reality she is so chary of this splendid hue; still we cannot but appreciate that this poet was in close and peculiar sympathy with flowers, and was wont to paint them with more than customary fidelity.