which she had no idea that others than herself would ever see, it still does not seem certain that the result would have been widely different had she been writing formally and for publication.

These oddities of structure and finish seem to betray the fact that a poem of hers is almost wholly first thought and not after-thought. Compare her work with that of A. E. Housman, who dealt with many of the same themes, and some of the difference due to after-thought should appear. The verse of Housman, direct and piercing as it is, seems yet to reflect multiplied exclusions, and a final simplicity that has been minutely wrought. The poems of Emily Dickinson seem to reflect simply the direct feelings of a profound heart. They seem less works of infinitely considered art, in which the effort has been guided to achievement by a subtly taught sense of poetic effect, than merely the spontaneous motions of a rich sensibility phrased with natural immediacy in language which, if irregular, is of sparkling definition.

There was, of course, nothing merely wandering about her poetic effort. However wholly from the heart her poems may seem to come, no one who much reads them can escape the impression that poetry, in her hands, becomes in good share a mental magic. Her trenchant measures are as free from the dwelling unction of the merely sensuous as they are free from the mere piecing out of insight. The penetrating phrases into which her thought and feeling are sharpened are set down with a close economy

ness.

that sometimes has the effect of extreme, fine dryAnd as significance is the substance of her force, so her verse follows the forms of wit as much as the forms of sense. Her poems might indeed be called epigrams. They might be called conceits, too, being often so whimsical, and so edging on quaintness in their originality; they might be called conceits, that is, were they less fervently intended. And whether conceits or epigrams, they seem always at the key of the often intangible matter, and have not only general pointedness but specific point.

To the service of her feeling she brought, perhaps as corollary to her characteristic inner vision, a rare and singular sense of words. Words, to her, were a festival; and she spent, as the biography notes, hours with the dictionary. And since there are not many of her single words that would not have been feasible and usual in ordinary intercourse, we can reasonably imagine that she must have been finding again the hidden, vivid textures in old meanings, restoring for herself the lost edges of ordinary expression, searching out the forgotten but astounding faces of customary words. It strikes one, too, that she had very positively that tremendous command of "things used as words," which, to Emerson, so marked the authentic poet. And to this command, one cannot forbear thinking, her escape from circumstance added, curiously, much strength and nourishing. Is it too much to suppose that when she contracted her existence, she increased, in certain ways, its depth and height? that when she then

looked at the things of her lessened life, it was more than before with the remarkable eyes of the imagination? that she then erected the familiar objects in her round of deeper days, with powerful lyric conviction, into symbols of far things? In her verse noon does not always mean merely noon; it seems sometimes to stand for the possibilities of a greater glory. Nor are storms seen from covert merely storms seen from covert; they call up thoughts of the refuge foreverlasting, even if that refuge be only the grave. It is not to be contended, surely, that symbolism achieved through so rich a temperament cannot add a weight to words.

Not only by symbolism, which seems a thing so elemental and so directly of the heart, but by her figures of speech, the products of her sense of similarity, her acute visualizing mentality, did she add strength to her verse. Her characteristic figure, perhaps, was metaphor, and it is apparently in the quality of her metaphor, and in the fact that not only her metaphor, which outstands, but all the smaller parts of her poetic utterance are made of the same vivid, chiefly visual substance, that her extraordinary poetic distinctiveness lives. Filled with the clearest colors and the most consummate lights, her poetic speech seems alive, to its smallest parts, with its special sparkle. Where is to be found a figurative note like hers in its combination of delicate brilliance and trenchant quaintness, its piquancy and its sincere fervor? It sets a mode in imagination that could found no fashions, for its secret is

not detachable. Here, indeed, we are as close as we shall get to the language of her individuality; and here we must rest merely with observing the force of spirit evident in its lightest terms. It recalls again that her poetry was not professional; that it was but a means by which she constructed her "bright detachment," and partly lightened a weight of thinking.

It must also have been, in the same direction, a laying up of the treasures of comprehension, of her deep knowledge of the interiors of the spirit, gained, evidently, with so much anguish. In her poems, said to have been found, for the most part, copied on note-paper, and laid away, tied with ribbon, in little bundles, each of six or eight sheets, one can refresh his feeling and thinking, secure that in what he thus comes back to, he will find no waning of choiceness. This brilliant understanding of the heart and its suffering, this great sensory delicacy, is rare essential wealth, proof against tarnish. It is seldom that one finds surer gold.

LUCIFER FROM NANTUCKET'

T

An Introduction to "Moby Dick"

By CARL VAN DOREN

I

HE AGE which produced Moby Dick failed to recognize its features in that stormy glass. Recognition has had to come from an age so different that it is obliged to view the book as a document of the past and to take its delight in qualities which, though essential to Melville, were only incidental to his main design. Whaling is now history. So, too, though more likely to be revived again, are such concerns as Melville felt for the plight of the soul voyaging through oceans of terror and doubt on the mortal quest for immortal certainty. But in Melville's day both matters were almost in the news.

New England, turning from her rocky pastures, had sought the more hospitable acres of the sea and had brought the art and science of whale-catching to a pitch never equaled before or since. In this the island of Nantucket led the chase. "The Nantucketer," says Melville, "he alone resides and riots on the sea; he alone, in Bible language, goes down 1 From The Century, August, 1925.