iarities.

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 p