a kate, and I know March. Here is the light the stranger said was
not on sea or land--myself could arrest it, but will not chagrin
him"--

"The wind blows gay today, and the jays bark like blue terriers."

"Friday I tasted life, it was a vast morsel. A circus passed the
house--still I feel the red in my mind though the drums are out."

"The lawn is full of south and the odors tangle, and I hear today for
the first the river in the tree."

"The zeros taught us phosphorus
We learned to like the fire
By playing glaciers when a boy
And tinder guessed by power

"Of opposite to balance odd
If white a red must be!
Paralysis, our primer dumb
Unto vitality."

Then comes the "crowning extravaganza.... If I read a book, and it
makes my whole body so cold no fire will ever warm me, I know that is
poetry. If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off,
I know that is poetry. Is there any other way? These are the only ways
I know it."

No one but a New England yankee mind could concoct such humours and
fascinatingly pert phrases as are found here. They are like the
chatterings of the interrupted squirrel in the tree-hole at nut-time.
There is so much of high gossip in these poetic turns of hers, and so,
throughout her books, one finds a multitude of playful tricks for the
pleased mind to run with. She was an intoxicated being, drunken with
the little tipsy joys of the simplest form, shaped as they were to
elude always her evasive imagination into thinking that nothing she
could think or feel but was extraordinary and remarkable. "Your
letter gave no drunkenness because I tasted rum before--Domingo comes
but once," etc., she wrote to Col. Higginson, a pretty conceit, surely
to offer a loved friend. The passages offered will give the unfamiliar
reader a taste of the sparkle of this poet's hurrying fancy and set
her before the willing mind entrancingly, it seems to me. She will
always delight those who find it in their way to love her elfish,
evasive genius, and those who care for the vivid and living element in
words will find her, to say the least, among the masters in her
feeling for their strange shapes and the fresh significance contained
in them. A born thinker of poetry, and in a great measure a gifted
writer of it, refreshing many a heavy moment made dull with the
weightiness of books, or of burdensome thinking. This poet-sprite sets
scurrying all weariness of the brain,