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 will be even, some new equation given.”  “Christ will explain each separate anguish in the fair schoolroom of the sky.”

    “A death-blow is a life-blow to some
    Who, till they died, did not alive become;
    Who, had they lived, had died, but when
    They died, vitality begun.”

The reader who has had the patience to accompany me through these pages devoted to Miss Dickinson will surely own, whether in scoff or praise, the essentially American nature of her muse.  Her defects are easily paralleled in the annals of English literature; but only in the liberal atmosphere of the New World, comparatively unshadowed by trammels of authority and standards of taste, could they have co-existed with so much of the highest quality.

A prominent phenomenon in the development of American literature—­so prominent as to call for comment even in a fragmentary and haphazard sketch like the present—­is the influence exercised by the monthly magazine.  The editors of the leading literary periodicals have been practically able to wield a censorship to which there is no parallel in England.  The magazine has been the recognised