eculiarity 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 a