who was writing her little worthless
poetic nothings, or so she was wont to think of them, at a time when
the now classical New England group was flourishing around Concord,
when Hawthorne was burrowing into the soul of things, Thoreau was
refusing to make more pencils and took to sounding lake bottoms and
holding converse with all kinds of fish and other water life, and
Emerson was standing high upon his pedestal preaching of
compensations, of friendship, society and the oversoul, leaving a
mighty impress upon his New England and the world at large as well.

I find when I take up Emily Dickinson, that I am sort of sunning
myself in the discal radiance of a bright, vivid, and really new type
of poet, for she is by no means worn of her freshness for us, she
wears with one as would an old fashioned pearl set in gold and dark
enamels. She offsets the smugness of the time in which she lived with
her cheery impertinence, and startles the present with her uncommon
gifts. Those who know the irresistible charm of this girl--who gave
so charming a portrait of herself to the stranger friend who inquired
for a photograph: "I had no portrait now, but am small like the wren,
and my hair is bold like the chestnut burr, and my eyes like the
sherry in the glass that the guest leaves," this written in July,
1862--shall be of course familiar with the undeniable originality of
her personality, the grace and special beauty of her mind, charm
unique in itself, not like any other genius then or now, or in the
time before her, having perhaps a little of relationship to the
crystal clearness of Crashaw, like Vaughan and Donne maybe, in respect
of their lyrical fervour and moral earnestness, yet nevertheless
appearing to us freshly with as separate a spirit in her verse
creations as she herself was separated from the world around her by
the amplitude of garden which was her universe. Emily Dickinson
confronts you at once with an instinct for poetry, to be envied by the
more ordinary and perhaps more finished poets. Ordinary she never was,
common she never could have been, for she was first and last
aristocrat in sensibility, rare and untouchable if you will, vague and
mystical often enough, unapproachable and often distinctly aloof, as
undoubtedly she herself was in her personal life. Those with a
fondness for intimacy will find her, like all recluses, forbidding and
difficult, if not altogether terrifying the mind with her vagueries
and pecul