than in objective theme.  Miss Emily Dickinson is still a name so unfamiliar to English readers that I may be pardoned a few lines of biographical explanation.  She was born in 1830, the daughter of the leading lawyer of Amherst, a small and quiet town of New England, delightfully situated on a hill, looking out over the undulating woods of the Connecticut valley.  It is a little larger than the English Marlborough, and like it owes its distinctive tone to the presence of an important educational institute, Amherst College being one of the best-known and worthiest of the smaller American colleges.  In this quiet little spot Miss Dickinson spent the whole of her life, and even to its limited society she was almost as invisible as a cloistered nun except for her appearances at an annual reception given by her father to the dignitaries of the town and college.  There was no definite reason either in her physical or mental health for this life of extraordinary seclusion; it seems to have been simply the natural outcome of a singularly introspective temperament.  She rarely showed or spoke of her poems to any but one or two intimate friends; only three or four were published during her lifetime; and it was with considerable surprise that her relatives found, on her death in 1886, a large mass of poetical remains, finished and unfinished.  A considerable selection from them has been published in three little volumes, edited with tender appreciation by two of her friends, Mrs. Mabel Loomis Todd and Col.  T.W.  Higginson.

Her poems are all in lyrical form—­if the word form may be applied to her utter disregard of all metrical conventions.  Her lines are rugged and her expressions wayward to an extraordinary degree, but “her verses all show a strange cadence of inner rhythmical music,” and the “thought-rhymes” which she often substitutes for the more regular assonances appeal “to an unrecognised sense more elusive than hearing” (Mrs. Todd).  In this curious divergence from established rules of verse Miss Dickinson may be likened to Walt Whitman, whom she differs from in every other particular, and notably in her pithiness as opposed to his diffuseness; but with her we feel in the strongest way that her mode is natural and unsought, utterly free from affectation, posing, or self-consciousness.

Colonel Higginson rightly finds her nearest analogue in William Blake; but this “nearest” is far from identity.  While tenderly feminine in her sympathy for suffering, her love of nature, her loyalty to her friends, she is in expression the most unfeminine of poets.  The usual feminine impulsiveness and full expression of emotion is replaced in her by an extraordinary condensation of phrase and feeling.  In her letters we find the eternal womanly in her yearning love for her friends, her brooding anxiety and sympathy for the few lives closely intertwined with her own.  In her poems, however, one is rather impressed with the deep well of poetic insight and