nd sense inseparable, little sister of
Shelley certainly she was, and the more playful relative of Francis
Thompson.

She had about her the imperishable quality that hovers about all
things young and strong and beautiful, she was the sense of beauty
ungovernable. What there are of tendencies religious and moral disturb
in nowise those who love and have appreciation for true poetic
essences. She had in her brain the inevitable buzzing of the bee in
the belly of the bloom, she had in her eyes the climbing lances of the
sun, she had in her heart love and pity for the innumerable pitiful
and pitiable things. She was a quenchless mother in her gift for
solace and she was lover to the immeasurable love. Like all
aristocrats she hated mediocrity, and like all first rate jewels, she
had no rift to hide. She was not a maker of poetry, she was a thinker
of poetry. She was not a conjurer of words so much as a magician in
sensibility. She has only to see and feel and hear to be in touch with
all things with a name or with things that must be forever nameless.
If she loved people, she loved them for what they were, if she
despised them she despised them for what they did, or for lack of
power to feel they could not do. Silence under a tree was a far more
talkative experience with her than converse with one or a thousand
dull minds. Her throng was the air, and her wings were the multitude
of flying movements in her brain. She had only to think and she was
amid numberless minarets and golden domes, she had only to think and
the mountain cleft its shadow in her heart.

Emily Dickinson is in no sense toil for the mind accustomed to the
labours of reading, she is too fanciful and delicious ever to make
heavy the head, she sets you to laughter and draws a smile across your
face for pity, and lets you loose again amid the measureless pleasing
little humanities. I shall always want to read Emily Dickinson, for
she points her finger at all tiresome scholasticism, and takes a
chance with the universe about her and the first rate poetry it offers
at every hand within the eye's easy glancing. She has made poetry
memorable as a pastime for the mind, and sent the heavier ministerial
tendencies flying to a speedy oblivion. What a child she was, child
impertinent, with a heavenly rippling in her brain!

These random passages out of her writings will show at once the rarity
of her tastes and the originality of her phrasing. "February passed
like