That Miss Dickinson's memoranda have a certain something which, for want
of a more precise name, we term _quality_, is not to be denied. But
the incoherence and shapelessness of the greater part of her verse are
fatal. On nearly every page one lights upon an unsupported exquisite
line or a lonely happy epithet; but a single happy epithet or an
isolated exquisite line does not constitute a poem. What Lowell says
of Dr. Donne applies in a manner to Miss Dickinson: "Donne is full of
salient verses that would take the rudest March winds of criticism with
their beauty, of thoughts that first tease us like charades and then
delight us with the felicity of their solution; but these have not saved
him. He is exiled to the limbo of the formless and the fragmentary."
Touching this question of mere technique Mr. Ruskin has a word to say
(it appears that he said it "in his earlier and better days"), and Mr.
Higginson quotes it: "No weight, nor mass, nor beauty of execution can
outweigh one grain or fragment of thought.
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