leading lawyer
of Amherst, a small and quiet town of New England, delightfully
situated on a hill, looking out over the undulating woods of the
Connecticut valley. It is a little larger than the English
Marlborough, and like it owes its distinctive tone to the presence of
an important educational institute, Amherst College being one of the
best-known and worthiest of the smaller American colleges. In this
quiet little spot Miss Dickinson spent the whole of her life, and even
to its limited society she was almost as invisible as a cloistered nun
except for her appearances at an annual reception given by her father
to the dignitaries of the town and college. There was no definite
reason either in her physical or mental health for this life of
extraordinary seclusion; it seems to have been simply the natural
outcome of a singularly introspective temperament. She rarely showed
or spoke of her poems to any but one or two intimate friends; only
three or four were published during her lifetime; and it was with
considerable surprise that her relatives found, on her death in 1886,
a large mass of poetical remains, finished and unfinished. A
considerable selection from them has been published in three little
volumes, edited with tender appreciation by two of her friends, Mrs.
Mabel Loomis Todd and Col. T.W. Higginson.

Her poems are all in lyrical form--if the word form may be applied to
her utter disregard of all metrical conventions. Her lines are rugged
and her expressions wayward to an extraordinary degree, but "her
verses all show a strange cadence of inner rhythmical music," and the
"thought-rhymes" which she often substitutes for the more regular
assonances appeal "to an unrecognised sense more elusive than hearing"
(Mrs. Todd). In this curious divergence from established rules of
verse Miss Dickinson may be likened to Walt Whitman, whom she differs
from in every other particular, and notably in her pithiness as
opposed to his diffuseness; but with her we feel in the strongest way
that her mode is natural and unsought, utterly free from affectation,
posing, or self-consciousness.

Colonel Higginson rightly finds her nearest analogue in William Blake;
but this "nearest" is far from identity. While tenderly feminine in
her sympathy for suffering, her love of nature, her loyalty to her
friends, she is in expression the most unfeminine of poets. The usual
feminine impulsiveness and full expression of emotion is replaced in