and they shall have an hour of
sheer delight who invite poetic converse with Emily Dickinson. She
will repay with funds of rich celestial coin from her rare and
precious fancyings. She had that "oblique integrity" which she
celebrates in one of her poems.

ADELAIDE CRAPSEY

One more satellite hurried away too soon! High hints at least, of the
young meteor finding its way through space. Here was another of those,
with a vast fund of wishing in her brain, and the briefest of hours in
which to set them roaming. Brevities that whirl through the mind as
you read those cinquains of Adelaide Crapsey, like white birds through
the dark woodlands of the night. Cameos or castles, what is size? Is
it not the same if they are of one perfection of feeling? Such a
little book of Adelaide Crapsey, surely like cameos cut on shell, so
clear in outline, so rich in form, so brave in indications, so much of
singing, so much of poetry, of courage.

"Just now,
Out of the strange
Still dusk--as strange, as still,
A white moth flew; Why am I grown
So cold?"

Isn't the evidence sufficient here of first rate poetic gifts,
sensibility of an exceptional order? Contrast in so many ways with
that perhaps more radiant and certainly more whimsical girl, with her
rarest of flavours, she with her "whip of diamond, riding to meet the
Earl"! I think geniuses like Keats or Shelley would have said "how do
you do, poet?" to Adelaide Crapsey and her verse, lamenting also that
she flew over the rainbowed edge of the dusk too soon, like the very
moth over the garden wall, early in the evening. It is sure that had
this poet been allowed her full quota of days, she would have left
some handsome folios bright enough for any one caring for verse at its
purest. Pity there was not time for another book at least, of her
verses, to verify the great distinction conferred. She might have
walked still more largely away with the wreaths of recognition. Not
time for more books, instead of so much eternity at her bedside. She
would surely have sent more words singing to their high places and
have impressed the abundant output of the day with its superficiality
by her seriousness. There is no trifling in these poetic things of
hers. Trivial might some say who hanker after giantesque composition.
Fragile are they only in the sense of size, only in this way are they
small.

Those who know the difficulties of writing poetic composition are
a