Page:The Life and Letters of Emily Dickinson (1924).pdf/14

 ignorant of the thronging events of the Spirit which eternally preoccupied her.

This present record is made up from family letters hitherto withheld, deathless recollections, and many sentences overheard from her own lips and scrupulously set down as too unique to be squandered upon the passing moment. The Letters formerly printed have now been chronologically arranged, and as far as of intrinsic value, retained; others have been added from my article in the "Atlantic Monthly," and "The Single Hound," a volume composed entirely of poetic flashes sent to her brother's wife, my mother, on every gust of impulse.

A high exigence constrains the sole survivor of her family to state her simply and truthfully, in view of a public which has, doubtless without intention, misunderstood and exaggerated her seclusion—amassing a really voluminous stock of quite lurid misinformation of irrelevant personalities. She has been taught in colleges as a weird recluse, rehearsed to women's clubs as a lovelorn sentimentalist—even betrayed by one American essayist of repute to appear a fantastic eccentric.

On the other hand, she has been named "the Feminine Walt Whitman" in at least one of the great universities; in another— Of the Colossal substance Of immortality.

THE EVERGREENS AMHERST MASSACHUSETTS