"Of opposite to balance odd If white a red must be! Paralysis, our primer dumb Unto vitality." Then comes the "crowning extravaganza.... If I read a book, and it makes my whole body so cold no fire will ever warm me, I know that is poetry. If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry. Is there any other way? These are the only ways I know it." No one but a New England yankee mind could concoct such humours and fascinatingly pert phrases as are found here. They are like the chatterings of the interrupted squirrel in the tree-hole at nut-time. There is so much of high gossip in these poetic turns of hers, and so, throughout her books, one finds a multitude of playful tricks for the pleased mind to run with. She was an intoxicated being, drunken with the little tipsy joys of the simplest form, shaped as they were to elude always her evasive imagination into thinking that nothing she could think or feel but was extraordinary and remarkable. "Your letter gave no drunkenness because I tasted rum before--Domingo comes but once," etc., she wrote to Col. Higginson, a pretty conceit, surely to offer a loved friend. The passages offered will give the unfamiliar reader a taste of the sparkle of this poet's hurrying fancy and set her before the willing mind entrancingly, it seems to me. She will always delight those who find it in their way to love her elfish, evasive genius, and those who care for the vivid and living element in words will find her, to say the least, among the masters in her feeling for their strange shapes and the fresh significance contained in them. A born thinker of poetry, and in a great measure a gifted writer of it, refreshing many a heavy moment made dull with the weightiness of books, or of burdensome thinking. This poet-sprite sets scurrying all weariness of the brain, and they shall have an hour of sheer delight who invite poetic converse with Emily Dickinson. She will repay with funds of rich celestial coin from her rare and precious fancyings. She had that "oblique integrity" which she celebrates in one of her poems. ADELAIDE CRAPSEY One more satellite hurried away too soon! High hints at least, of the young meteor finding its way through space. Here was another of those, with a vast fund of wishing in her brain, and the briefest of hours in which to set them roaming. Brevities that whirl through the mind as you read those cinquains of Adelaide Crapsey, like white birds through the dark woodlands of the night. Cameos or castles, what is size? Is it not the same if they are of one perfection of feeling? Such a little book of Adelaide Crapsey, surely like cameos cut on shell, so clear in outline, so rich in form, so brave in indications, so much of singing, so much of poetry, of courage. "Just now, Out of the strange Still dusk--as strange, as still, A white moth flew; Why am I grown So cold?"