Page:The Life and Letters of Emily Dickinson (1924).pdf/127

Rh sight. What a contrast her own cry: "Could pathos compete with that simple statement, — "Not that we first loved Him, but that He first loved us'?" But the contribution to Faith that Emily Dickinson made to the world will some day be definitely recognized. Her way of loving God, knowing Him, serving Him, was as ancient as Brother Lawrence, as modern as William James. Brother Lawrence in the seventeenth century saying the smallest action for the love of God is all, and Emily saying, "The simplest solace with a loved aim has a heavenly quality," are really more than paraphrase. The similarity of their source of power parallels in his letters as well as its daily exhibition.

She had the soul of a monk of the Middle Ages bound up in the flesh of Puritan descent, and, from Heaven only knows where, all the fiery quality of imagination for which genius has been burned at the stake in one form or another since the beginning. She accepted the results of her training, as she shows in her attitude that if He be against us all other allies are useless! Even this is not so much resignation of the true brand as shrewd observation in result.

One of the students of her poetry — himself a preacher of brilliant reputation — writes of her: "Her power is really the unusual degree in which she reflects the divine.

...If her genius was inspiration, it was something to which every soul that is human has a claim, in some humble degree, to share; and the way in which she lived deserved study for the light it may throw upon what mankind can do to come into its own share of the same gift."

She was not a pantheist, though she saw each tree and