hich is not, however, _mere_
extravagance) and her ultra-American familiarity with the forces of
nature may be illustrated by such stanzas as:

"What if the poles should frisk about
And stand upon their heads!
I hope I'm ready for the worst,
Whatever prank betides."

* * * * *

"If I could see you in a year,
I'd wind the months in balls,
And put them each in separate drawers
Until their time befalls.

"If certain, when this life was out,
That yours and mine should be,
I'd toss it yonder like a rind,
And taste eternity."

For her the lightnings "skip like mice," the thunder "crumbles like a
stuff." What a critic has called her "Emersonian self-possession"
towards God may be seen in the little poem on the last page of her
first volume, where she addresses the Deity as "burglar, banker,
father." There is, however, no flippancy in this, no conscious
irreverence; Miss Dickinson is not "orthodox," but she is genuinely
spiritual and religious. Inspired by its truly American and "_actuel_"
freedom, her muse does not fear to sing of such modern and mechanical
phenomena as the railway train, which she loves to see "lap the miles
and lick the valleys up," while she is fascinated by the contrast
between its prodigious force and the way in which it stops, "docile
and omnipotent, at its own stable door." But even she can hardly bring
the smoking locomotive into such pathetic relations with nature as the
"little brig," whose "white foot tripped, then dropped from sight,"
leaving "the ocean's heart too smooth, too blue, to break for you."

Her poems on death and the beyond, on time and eternity, are full of
her peculiar note. Death is the "one dignity" that "delays for all;"
the meanest brow is so ennobled by the majesty of death that "almost a
powdered footman might dare to touch it now," and yet no beggar would
accept "the _eclat_ of death, had he the power to spurn." "The quiet
nonchalance of death" is a resting-place which has no terrors for her;
death "abashed" her no more than "the porter of her father's lodge."
Death's chariot also holds Immortality. The setting sail for "deep
eternity" brings a "divine intoxication" such as the "inland soul"
feels on its "first league out from land." Though she "never spoke
with God, nor visited in heaven," she is "as certain of the spot as if
the chart were given." "In heaven somehow, it w