Page:The complete poems of Emily Dickinson, (IA completepoemsofe00dick 1).pdf/11

 INTRODUCTION

poems of Emily Dickinson, published in a series of three volumes at various intervals after her death in 1886, and in a volume entitled "The Single Hound", published in 1914, with the addition of a few before omitted, are here collected in a final complete edition.

In them and in her "Life and Letters", recently presented in one inclusive volume, lives all of Emily Dickinson—for the outward circumstance matters little, nor is this the place for discussion as to whether fate ordained her or she ordained her own foreordination.

Many of her poems have been reprinted in anthologies, selections, textbooks for recitation, and they have increasingly found their elect and been best interpreted by the expansion of those lives they have seized upon by force of their natural, profound intuition of the miracles of everyday Life, Love, and Death.

She herself was of the part of life that is always youth, always magical. She wrote of it as she grew to know it, step by step, discovery by discovery, truth by truth—until time merely became eternity. She was preeminently the discoverer—eagerly hunting the meaning of it all; this strange world in which she wonderingly found herself,—"A Balboa of house and garden," surmising what lay beyond the purple horizon. She lived with a God we do not believe in, and trusted in an immortality [v]