Emily Dickinson

Emily Dickinson, whose work is one of the most original contributions to recent poetry, was born in Amherst, Massachusetts, December 10, 1830. She was a physical as well as a spiritual hermit, actually spending most of her life without setting foot beyond her doorstep. She wrote her short, introspective verses without thought of publication, and it was not until 1890, four years after her death, that the first volume of her posthumous poetry appeared with an introduction by Thomas Wentworth Higginson.

"She habitually concealed her mind, like her person, from all but a very few friends," writes Higginson, "and it was with great difficulty that she was persuaded to print, during her lifetime, three or four poems." Yet she wrote almost five hundred of these direct and spontaneous illuminations, sending many of them in letters to friends, or (written on chance slips of paper and delivered without further comment) to her sister Sue. Slowly the peculiar Blake-like quality of her thought won a widening circle of readers; Poems (1890) was followed by Poems-Second Series (1892) and Poems-Third Series (1896), the contents being collected and edited by her two friends, Thomas Wentworth Higginson and Mabel Loomis Todd. Several years later, a further generous volume was assembled by her niece, Martha Dickinson Bianchi, entitled The Single Hound (1914)—almost all of the new poems (to which Mrs. Bianchi wrote a preface of great personal value) being a record of Emily Dickinson's romantic friendship for her sister. The sharp quality of her work, with its cool precision and clear imagery, makes her akin, at least in technique, to the later Imagists. (See Preface.) But a passionate and almost mystical warmth brings her closer to the great ones of her

time. "An epigrammatic Walt Whitman," some one has called her, a characterization which, while enthusiastic to the point of exaggeration, expresses the direction if not the execution of her art. Technically, Emily Dickinson's work was strikingly uneven; many of her poems are no more than rough sketches, awkwardly filled in; even some of her finest lines are marred by the intrusion of merely trivial conceits or forced thought-rhymes." But the best of her work is incomparable in its strange cadence and quiet intensity. Her verses are like a box of many jewels, sparkling in their brilliancy, cameo-like in their delicate contours, opalescent in their buried fires.

Emily Dickinson died, in the same place she was born, at Amherst, May 15, 1886.

CHARTLESS

I never saw a moor,

I never saw the sea;

Yet now I know how the heather looks,

And what a wave must be.

I never spoke with God,
Nor visited in Heaven;
Yet certain am I of the spot
As if the chart were given.

INDIAN SUMMER

These are the days when birds come back,

A very few, a bird or two,

To take a backward look.

These are the days when skies put on
The old, old sophistries of June,-
A blue and gold mistake.

Oh, fraud that can not cheat the bee,
Almost thy plausibility

Induces my belief,

Till ranks of seeds their witness bear, And softly through the altered air Hurries a timid leaf!

Oh, sacrament of summer days,
Oh, last communion in the haze,
Permit a child to join,

Thy sacred emblems to partake,
Thy consecrated bread to break,
Taste thine immortal wine!

SUSPENSE

Elysium is as far as to

The very nearest room,

If in that room a friend await

Felicity or doom.

What fortitude the soul contains,

That it can so endure

The accent of a coming foot,

The opening of a door.

THE RAILWAY TRAIN

I like to see it lap the miles,
And lick the valleys up,

And stop to feed itself at tanks;
And then, prodigious, step

Around a pile of mountains,
And, supercilious, peer

In shanties by the sides of roads;
And then a quarry pare

To fit its sides, and crawl between,
Complaining all the while

In horrid, hooting stanza;

Then chase itself down hill

And neigh like Boanerges;
Then, punctual as a star,
Stop-docile and omnipotent-
At its own stable door.

A CEMETERY

This quiet Dust was Gentlemen and Ladies,
And Lads and Girls;

Was laughter and ability and sighing,
And frocks and curls.

This passive place a Summer's nimble mansion,

Where Bloom and Bees

Fulfilled their Oriental Circuit,

Then ceased like these.

BECLOUDED

The sky is low, the clouds are mean,
A travelling flake of snow

Across a barn or through a rut
Debates if it will go.

A narrow wind complains all day
How some one treated him;

Nature, like us, is sometimes caught
Without her diadem.

Thomas Bailey Aldrich

Thomas Bailey Aldrich was born in 1836 at Portsmouth, New Hampshire, where he spent most of the sixteen years which he has recorded in that delightful memoir, The Story of a Bad Boy (1869). After a brief clerkship, he became junior literary critic of The Evening Mirror at nineteen, publishing his first book (The Bells), an immature collection of echoes, at the same time. From 1855 to 1866 he held various journalistic positions, associating himself with the leading metropolitan literati. But though Aldrich mingled with the New York group, he was not part of it; he longed for the more rarefied intellectual atmosphere of New England and when, in 1866, Osgood offered him the editorship of Every Saturday, published in Boston, Aldrich accepted with alacrity. A few years later he became editor of the famous Atlantic Monthly, holding that position from 1881 to 1890.

Aldrich's work falls into two sharply-divided classes. The first half is full of overloaded phrase-making, fervid extravagances; the reader sinks beneath clouds of damask, azure,