s to her philosophy -- and one can suck wisdom from her writings -- I know no space so small more packed with nutriment than this quatrain:

 The pedigree of honey
      Does not concern the bee;
 A clover, any time, to him
      Is aristocracy.

Or these stanzas:

 I'm nobody! Who are you?
      Are you nobody, too?
 Then there's a pair of us -- don't tell!
      They'd banish us, you know.

 How dreary to be somebody!
      How public, like a frog,
 To tell your name the livelong day
      To an admiring bog!

Critical acumen usually accompanies the poetic gift. The very travail of the mind -- and how sore it was with Emily Dickinson! -- to give birth to an organic thought, renders one sensitive to the throes of others, and joyous over any man child born into the world. There are passing comments in her letters that flash light upon the bearer of the torch. Desiring to send the Life of George Eliot to Colonel Higginson, she made this pregnant comment, "Emblem is immeasurable -- that is why it is better than fulfillment, which can be drained." Ten years before she had written, "What do I think of Middlemarch? What do I think of glory -- except that in a few instances this mortal has already put on immortality? George Eliot is one." Of the same novel, sent to Mrs. Higginson, she said, "I am bringing you a little granite book for you to lean upon." At the time of the great novelist's death, she wrote with prescience of love: "Now my George Eliot. The gift of belief which her greatness denied her, I trust she received in the childhood of the kingdom of heaven. As childhood is earth's confiding time, perhaps, having no childhood, she lost her way to the early trust, and no later came." To a favorite poet she made this allusion, as delicately fragrant as a violet in the grass: "Love you know, is God, who certainly 'gave the love to reward the love,' even were there no Browning." Of the greatest she wrote: "While Shakespeare remains, literature is firm. An insect cannot run away with Achilles head."