her by an extraordinary condensation of phrase and feeling. In her
letters we find the eternal womanly in her yearning love for her
friends, her brooding anxiety and sympathy for the few lives closely
intertwined with her own. In her poems, however, one is rather
impressed with the deep well of poetic insight and feeling from which
she draws, but never unreservedly. In spite of frequent strange
exaggeration of phrase one is always conscious of a fund of reserve
force. The subjects of her poems are few, but the piercing delicacy
and depth of vision with which she turned from death and eternity to
nature and to love make us feel the presence of that rare thing,
genius. Hers is a wonderful instance of the way in which genius can
dispense with experience; she sees more by pure intuition than others
distil from the serried facts of an eventful life. Perhaps, in one of
her own phrases, she is "too intrinsic for renown," but she has
appealed strongly to a surprisingly large band of readers in the
United States, and it seems to me will always hold her audience. Those
who admit Miss Dickinson's talent, but deny it to be poetry, may be
referred to Thoreau's saying that no definition of poetry can be given
which the true poet will not somewhere sometime brush aside. It is a
new departure, and the writer in the _Nation_ (Oct. 10, 1895) is
probably right when he says: "So marked a new departure rarely leads
to further growth. Neither Whitman nor Miss Dickinson ever stepped
beyond the circle they first drew."

It is difficult to select quite adequate samples of Miss Dickinson's
art, but perhaps the following little poems will give some idea of her
naked simplicity, terseness, oddness,--of her method, in short, if we
can apply that word to anything so spontaneous and unconscious:

"I'm nobody! Who are you?
Are you nobody, too?
Then there's a pair of us. Don't tell!
They'd banish us, you know.

"How dreary to be somebody!
How public, like a frog,
To tell your name the livelong day
To an admiring bog!"

* * * * *

"I taste a liquor never brewed,
From tankards scooped in pearl;
Not all the vats upon the Rhine
Yield such an alcohol!

"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 b