son's poetry so felicitous as Mr. Higginson's characterization of
it in his preface to the volume: "In many cases these verses will seem
to the reader _like poetry pulled up by the roots_, with rain and dew
and earth clinging to them." Possibly it might be objected that this is
not the best way to gather either flowers or poetry.

Miss Dickinson possessed an extremely unconventional and bizarre mind.
She was deeply tinged by the mysticism of Blake, and strongly influenced
by the mannerism of Emerson. The very gesture with which she tied her
bonnet-strings, preparatory to one of her nun-like walks in her garden
at Amherst, must have had something dreamy and Emersonian in it. She had
much fancy of a quaint kind, but only, as it appears to me, intermittent
flashes of imagination.

That Miss Dickinson's memoranda have a certain something which, for want
of a more precise name, we term _quality_, is not to be denied. But
the incoherence and shapelessness of the greater part of her verse are
fatal. On nearly every page one lights upon an unsupported exquisite
line or a lonely happy epithet; but a single happy epithet or an
isolated exquisite line does not constitute a poem. What Lowell says
of Dr. Donne applies in a manner to Miss Dickinson: "Donne is full of
salient verses that would take the rudest March winds of criticism with
their beauty, of thoughts that first tease us like charades and then
delight us with the felicity of their solution; but these have not saved
him. He is exiled to the limbo of the formless and the fragmentary."

Touching this question of mere technique Mr. Ruskin has a word to say
(it appears that he said it "in his earlier and better days"), and Mr.
Higginson quotes it: "No weight, nor mass, nor beauty of execution can
outweigh one grain or fragment of thought." This is a proposition to
which one would cordially subscribe if it were not so intemperately
stated. A suggestive commentary on Mr. Ruskin's impressive dictum is
furnished by his own volume of verse. The substance of it is weighty
enough, but the workmanship lacks just that touch which distinguishes
the artist from the bungler--the touch which Mr. Ruskin, except when
writing prose, appears not much to have regarded either in his later or
"in his earlier and better days."

Miss Dickinson's stanzas, with their impossible rhyme, their involved
significance, their interrupted flute-note of birds that have no
continuous music, seem to have cau