Here was New England at its sharpest, brightest, wittiest, most fantastic, most wilful, most devout, saint and imp sported in one, toying with the tricks of the Deity, taking them now with extreme profundity, then tossing them about like irresistible toys with an incomparable triviality. She has traced upon the page and 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 stardust as perhaps no other before her, certainly not in this country, none with just her celestial attachedness, or must we call it detachedness, and withal also a sublime, impertinent playfulness which makes her images dance before one like offspring of the great round sun, fooling zealously with the universes at her feet, and just beyond her eye, with a loftiness of spirit and of exquisite trivialness seconded by none. Who has not read these flippant renderings, holding always some touch of austerity and gravity of mood, or the still more perfect "letters" to her friends, will, I think, have missed a new kind of poetic diversion, a new loveliness, evasive, alert, pronounced in every interval and serious, modestly 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 as she surely was always, playing in some celestial garden 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—"hail to thee, blithe spirit, bird thou ever wert"!
It must be said in all justice, then, that "fascination was her element," everything to her was wondrous, sublimely magical, awsomely 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 daughter of the ancient imagination. One feels everywhere in her verse and in her so splendid and stylish letters an unexcelled freshness, brightness of metaphor and of imagery, a gift of a peculiarity that could have come only from this part of our country, 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 hold. If ever wanderer hitched vehicle to the comet's tail, it was the poetic, sprite woman, no one ever rode the sky and the earth as she did in this radiant and skybright mind of her.
She loved all things because all things were in one way or in another way 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 splendour of frosty traceries upon the windowpane in a frigid time, and of the raindrop in the sun, and summered them with 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 illumined with a splendour not their own merely, but lent them by shafts from that radiant sphere which she leaned from, looking out gleefully upon them from the window of 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 widely over the edges of infinity. She is alive for us now in those rare fancies of hers, with no other wish in them save as memorandum for her own eyes, and when they were finished to send them spinning across the wide garden, many of them to her favorite sister who lived far, far away, over beyond the hedge. You shall find in her all that is winsome, strange, fanciful, fantastic and irresistible in the eastern character and characteristic. She is first and best in lightsomeness of temper, for the eastern is known as essentially a tragic genius. She is perhaps the single exponent of modern times of the quality of true celestial frivolity. Scintillant was she then, and like dew she was 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, little sister of Shelley certainly she was, 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 was the sense of beauty ungovernable. What there are of tendencies religious and moral disturb in nowise those who love and have appreciation for true poetic essences. She had in her brain the inevitable buzzing of the bee in the belly of the bloom, she had in her eyes the climbing lances of the sun, she had in her heart love and pity for the innumerable pitiful and pitiable things. She was a quenchless mother in her gift for solace and she was lover to the immeasurable love. 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 conjurer of words so much as a magician in sensibility. She has 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 accustomed to the labours 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 tiresome scholasticism, and takes a chance with the universe about her and the first rate 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 out of 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."
"The lawn is full of south and the odors tangle, and I hear today for the first the river in the tree."