The little picture has all the opaline atmosphere of a Claude
Lorraine. One instantly frames it in one's memory. Several such bits of
impressionist landscape may be found in the portfolio.
It is to be said, in passing, that there are few things in Miss
Dickinson's poetry so felicitous as Mr. Higginson's characterization of
it in his preface to the volume: "In many cases these verses will seem
to the reader _like poetry pulled up by the roots_, with rain and dew
and earth clinging to them." Possibly it might be objected that this is
not the best way to gather either flowers or poetry.
Miss Dickinson possessed an extremely unconventional and bizarre mind.
She was deeply tinged by the mysticism of Blake, and strongly influenced
by the mannerism of Emerson. The very gesture with which she tied her
bonnet-strings, preparatory to one of her nun-like walks in her garden
at Amherst, must have had something dreamy and Emersonian in it. She had
much fancy of a quaint kind, but only, as it appears to me, intermittent
flashes of imagination.
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