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“ [131] aloud, and embarrass my dog. He and I don't object to them, if they'll exist their side.” The reply is indicative of her weakness and of her strength. The woman who could afford, in all simplicity, to fall back upon her own companionship, and the companionship of animals, without caring to grow in wisdom, was of no ordinary character. Emily Dickinson never quite succeeded in grasping the notion of the importance of poetic form. The crudeness which an Emerson could mourn over, she could only acknowledge. With all its irregularity, however, her poetry preserves a lyrical power almost unequaled in her generation. In remoteness of allusion, in boldness of phrase, it stands at the opposite remove from the verse of Longfellow, for example; but if it can never attain popularity --the last fate which its author could have wished for it-it is likely, in the end, to obtain the attention of the “audience fit, thoa few,” which a greater poet once desired of Fate.


The magazines.

A word should be said of the periodicals which had their origin in Boston, and which played, each in its different way, so important a part in the development of New England literature. The North

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