She had about her the imperishable quality that hovers about all things young and strong and beautiful, she was the sense of beauty ungovernable. What there are of tendencies religious and moral disturb in nowise those who love and have appreciation for true poetic essences. She had in her brain the inevitable buzzing of the bee in the belly of the bloom, she had in her eyes the climbing lances of the sun, she had in her heart love and pity for the innumerable pitiful and pitiable things. She was a quenchless mother in her gift for solace and she was lover to the immeasurable love. Like all aristocrats she hated mediocrity, and like all first rate jewels, she had no rift to hide. She was not a maker of poetry, she was a thinker of poetry. She was not a conjurer of words so much as a magician in sensibility. She has only to see and feel and hear to be in touch with all things with a name or with things that must be forever nameless. If she loved people, she loved them for what they were, if she despised them she despised them for what they did, or for lack of power to feel they could not do. Silence under a tree was a far more talkative experience with her than converse with one or a thousand dull minds. Her throng was the air, and her wings were the multitude of flying movements in her brain. She had only to think and she was amid numberless minarets and golden domes, she had only to think and the mountain cleft its shadow in her heart. Emily Dickinson is in no sense toil for the mind accustomed to the labours of reading, she is too fanciful and delicious ever to make heavy the head, she sets you to laughter and draws a smile across your face for pity, and lets you loose again amid the measureless pleasing little humanities. I shall always want to read Emily Dickinson, for she points her finger at all tiresome scholasticism, and takes a chance with the universe about her and the first rate poetry it offers at every hand within the eye's easy glancing. She has made poetry memorable as a pastime for the mind, and sent the heavier ministerial tendencies flying to a speedy oblivion. What a child she was, child impertinent, with a heavenly rippling in her brain! These random passages out of her writings will show at once the rarity of her tastes and the originality of her phrasing. "February passed like 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