CELIA LEIGHTON THAXTER (1836-1894) 1

In all the best of Celia Thaxter's work,- in the Drift-Weed: Poems, 1878, and her Among the Isles of Shoals, 1873, poetic prose, there is the roar and the odor of the ocean. Her childhood and youth had been spent on one of the small, storm-beaten islands off the New Hampshire coast, where her father was keeper of the light. She knew little of the main-land until after her marriage with the young pastor who had visited the islands as a mission worker. Her poem 'Land-Locked' in the ninth volume of the Atlantic introduced her to the reading public. She published at length several volumes of poems, the first in 1872, but the greater part of her product does not rise much above the mediocre average of her day. When she touched the ocean she was convincing. There is, moreover, in her best work a spontaneousness and a womanly sympathy and depth of feeling that make the verses not mere compositions, but real lyrics.

EMILY DICKINSON (1830-1886)

The three volumes of Emily Dickinson's poetry, the first edited by Thomas Wentworth Higginson four years after her death, the second and third by Mabel Loomis Todd in 1891 and 1896 respectively, stand unique in American literature. They are the posthumously revealed work of one who for years lived in almost complete seclusion and who resisted all the importunities of her friends to give them publication. She was a native of Amherst, Massachusetts; her father was a prominent lawyer and the treasurer of Amherst College, and in her father's house and secluded grounds she spent the fifty-six years of her life. Her poems, gathered from her private portfolios, are as pale and exotic as the Indian pipe flowers on the covers of the little volumes in which they have been printed. They are startlingly, even crudely, original. Their author never knew criticism: she wrote as the whim or the inspiration of the moment dictated and did little revising. Dr. Holland, who was an intimate friend of the family, declared that they were too ethereal for publication.' Some of them remind one of the work of Blake. They are the record of the inner life of an abnormally sensitive soul,- fragments, lyrical ejaculations, childish conceits, little orphic sayings often illogical and meaningless, lines and couplets at times that are like glimpses of another world, spasmodic cries, always brief, always bearing upon the deepest things that life knows,-love, death, nature, time, eternity. Selections from her letters appeared in 1894.

VERSES

EMIGRAVIT

Went up a year this evening;

I recollect it well.
Amid no bells nor bravoes,
The bystanders will tell.
Cheerful, as to the village,
Tranquil, as to repose,
Chastened, as to the chapel,
This humble tourist rose.
Did not talk of returning —
Alluded to no time

When, were the gales propitious,
We might look for him;
Was grateful for the roses
In life's diverse bouquet;
Talked softly of new species
To pick, another day.
Beguiling thus the wonder,
The wondrous nearer drew;
Hands bustled at the moorings
The crowd respectful grew.
Ascended from our vision
To countenances new.
A difference, a daisy,

Is all the rest I knew.

THE LOST JEWEL 1

I held a Jewel in my fingers
And went to sleep.