feeling from which she draws, but never unreservedly.  In spite of frequent strange exaggeration of phrase one is always conscious of a fund of reserve force.  The subjects of her poems are few, but the piercing delicacy and depth of vision with which she turned from death and eternity to nature and to love make us feel the presence of that rare thing, genius.  Hers is a wonderful instance of the way in which genius can dispense with experience; she sees more by pure intuition than others distil from the serried facts of an eventful life.  Perhaps, in one of her own phrases, she is “too intrinsic for renown,” but she has appealed strongly to a surprisingly large band of readers in the United States, and it seems to me will always hold her audience.  Those who admit Miss Dickinson’s talent, but deny it to be poetry, may be referred to Thoreau’s saying that no definition of poetry can be given which the true poet will not somewhere sometime brush aside.  It is a new departure, and the writer in the Nation (Oct. 10, 1895) is probably right when he says:  “So marked a new departure rarely leads to further growth.  Neither Whitman nor Miss Dickinson ever stepped beyond the circle they first drew.”

It is difficult to select quite adequate samples of Miss Dickinson’s art, but perhaps the following little poems will give some idea of her naked simplicity, terseness, oddness,—­of her method, in short, if we can apply that word to anything so spontaneous and unconscious: 

“I’m nobody!  Who are you? 
Are you nobody, too? 
Then there’s a pair of us.  Don’t tell! 
They’d banish us, you know.

“How dreary to be somebody! 
How public, like a frog,
To tell your name the livelong day
To an admiring bog!”

* * * * *

“I taste a liquor never brewed,
From tankards scooped in pearl;
Not all the vats upon the Rhine
Yield such an alcohol!

“Inebriate of air am I,
And debauchee of dew,
Reeling, through endless summer days,
From inns of molten blue.

“When landlords turn the drunken bee
Out of the foxglove’s door,
When butterflies renounce their drams,
I shall but drink the more!

“Till seraphs swing their snowy hats,
And saints to windows run,
To see the little tippler
Leaning against the sun!”

* * * * *

“But how he set I know not. 
There seemed a purple stile
Which little yellow boys and girls
Were climbing all the while,

“Till when they reached the other side,
A dominie in grey
Put gently up the evening bars,
And led the flock away.”

* * * * *