o art can be adequately understood apart from the artist. Emily Dickinson is the best commentary upon her verse. I have recently visited "the house behind the hedge," where she was born and died. I have stood in the old-fashioned garden where she strolled, and grew intimate with bird and bee, butterfly and flower. I have listened to her bluebird, who
Shouts for joy to nobody
But his seraphic self,
and seen her robin brood its young. I have looked across her landscape on a June day at the Pelham range and repeated:
The skies can't keep their secret,
They tell it to the hills.
And letting thought and feeling slip in her accostomed grooves, I have ceased to wonder that Emily Dickinson shut herself in behind that austere but tonic hemlock hedge, and made her house a nunnery. I seemed to hear her voice saying:
The soul selects her own society,
Then shuts the door;
On her divine majority
Obtrude no more.
The events of Emily Dickinson's life are singularly few, but she invests each with significance. Her perception is at times as vivid as if, called to die, she were taking a last look. Deep and powerful are the strokes with which she limns an emotion, as if she were standing at a judgment bar. If the adjective "intense" were not so overworked, I should employ it. Had Emily Dickinson written novels they would have had the Brontëan quality -- flame. A friend tells me that during the later years of her life the poet was accustomed to keep a candle burning in her window at night for the belated traveller. It is symbolic of her genius.
It is the brevity and searching quality (in inverse ratio) of Emily Dickinson's poetry that render it unique, and augur permanence, not so much that it lights the pathway, as that it explains the heart and touches the quick of experience. Her verse is never didactic, yet always earnest; too serious for wit, yet having the very kernel of wit -- surprise -- to an extraordinary degree. This dressing up of the primal emotions in strange, often outlandish garb, or exhibiting them naked yet not ashamed, has a singular effect, and throws the mind back with questioning upon the writer herself, and the influences that made her what she was -- the loneliest figure in the world of letters.
They are not far to seek. There was the mother, whom "Noah would have liked," and the father, who stepped "like Cromwell, when he gets the kindlings." She sketches both saliently: "mother drives with Tim to carry pears to settlers. Sugar pears with hips like hams, and the flesh of bonbons... Father is growing better, though physically reluctant... You know he never played, and the straightest engine has its leaning hour." To Colonel Higginson she wrote: "my mother does not care for thought, and father, too busy with his briefs to notice what we do. He buys me many books, and begs me not to read them, because he fears they joggle the mind." To another friend she wrote: "Mother is very fond of flowers and of recollection, that sweetest flower."
