is Eden come again, with Eve in the
similitude of a three-pound trout.

In the country, then, it is well enough occasionally to dress by
candle-light and assist at the ceremony of dawn; it is well if for no
other purpose than to disarm the intolerance of the professional early
riser who, were he in a state of perfect health, would not be the
wandering victim of insomnia, and boast of it. There are few small
things more exasperating than this early bird with the worm of his
conceit in his bill.

UN POETE MANQUE

IN the first volume of Miss Dickinson's poetical melange is a little
poem which needs only a slight revision of the initial stanza to
entitle it to rank with some of the swallow-flights in Heine's lyrical
intermezzo. I have tentatively tucked a rhyme into that opening stanza:

I taste a liquor never brewed
In vats upon the Rhine;
No tankard ever held a draught
Of alcohol like mine.

Inebriate of air am I,
And debauchee of dew,
Reeling, through endless summer days,
From inns of molten blue.

When landlords turn the drunken bee
Out of the Foxglove's door,
When butterflies renounce their drams,
I shall but drink the more!
Till seraphs swing their snowy caps
And saints to windows run,
To see the little tippler
Leaning against the sun!

Those inns of molten blue, and the disreputable honey-gatherer who gets
himself turned out-of-doors at the sign of the Foxglove, are very taking
matters. I know of more important things that interest me vastly less.
This is one of the ten or twelve brief pieces so nearly perfect in
structure as almost to warrant the reader in suspecting that Miss
Dickinson's general disregard of form was a deliberate affectation. The
artistic finish of the following sunset-piece makes her usual quatrains
unforgivable:

This is the land the sunset washes,
These are the banks of the Yellow Sea;
Where it rose, or whither it rushes,
These are the western mystery!

Night after night her purple traffic
Strews the landing with opal bales;
Merchantmen poise upon horizons,
Dip, and vanish with fairy sails.

The little picture has all the opaline atmosphere of a Claude
Lorraine. One instantly frames it in one's memory. Several such bits of
impressionist landscape may be found in the portfolio.

It is to be said, in passing, that there are few things in Miss
Dickin