he poems collected in the present volume -- the fourth to be published since her death -- were all addressed, "on any chance slip of paper," during many years of "romantic friendship," to a sister-in-law who lived the width of a green lawn away. Yet "days, and even weeks, slipped by sometimes without their actual meeting." Mrs. Martha Dickinson Bianchi, deciding at last to publish her mother's treasury, adds a suggestive preface of anecdote and reminiscence to prove how little the aunt she loved resembled the poetess as she is "taught in colleges" -- "a weird recluse eating her heart out in morbid or unhappy longing, or a victim of unsatisfied passion."

Emily Dickinson to her nieces and nephews, was of "fairy lineage" -- "the confederate in every contraband desire," ready to start with horse and buggy for the moon at a moment's notice. "Fascination was her element." She was "lightning and fragrance in one." Mrs. Bianchi's delicate phrases give one hints of it: "her way of flitting, like a shadow upon the hillside, a motion known to no other mortal"; the way "her spirit seemed merely playing through her body as the aurora borealis through darkness"; her revelling "in the wings of her mind -- I had almost said the fins, too -- so universal was her identification with every form of life and element of being." We read of her wiles and ruses for escaping dull society; "he has the facts, but not the phosphorescence of learning"; of her respect for her father, the august leading lawyer of Amherst: "If Father is asleep on the sofa the house is full, though it were empty otherwise."

We learn, too, of the many lovers who attended her elusive and skittish path, and who were on the whole -- though men were more stimulating to her than gentlewomen of her day, whom she once set down in verse as "soft cherubic creatures" of "dimity convictions" -- well lost as husbands. For "she was not daily bread. She was stardust." As Emily Dickinson herself puts it:

 The missing All prevented me
 From missing minor things --

The colleges must be losing their sense of humor. For what thwarted old maid could write:

 To this apartment deep
 No ribaldry may creep.
 Untroubled this abode
 By any man but God.

Or say so perfectly:

 That Love is all there is,
 Is all we know of Love.
 It is enough: the freight should be
 Proportioned to the groove.


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