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Like a manuscript, all yellow, and with many things deleted,

Yet a manuscript completed, with embellishments most rare,

Berkley Common lies forgotten, with its fields of everlasting,

And the sunlight on the windows of the empty houses there.

As to exactly what she is trying to say in The Symbols, I am in doubt, but it is hard to forget the Talmud stalking like a rabbi in a gown.

On the one hand, with Nathalia, we have simply a rhyming gift turned to amusing descriptions of certain fairly ordinary episodes and characteristics of life that interest every healthily alert young lady. On the other hand, we have the beginnings of a poet with a true ear for rhythm, an eye for the color of words, and a fancy that often rises into the realm of imagination. I only hope that the young lady will continue to enjoy all the ordinary incidents of her existence as much as she has heretofore, and to perfect her technique in her spare moments. It needs perfecting. It is hardly to be wondered at that her work is still in the experimental stage. She is not yet “the youngest of the seers,” nor yet “released from fetters of ancestral pose,” but there is undoubtedly conquest of poetic beauty “waiting down the years” for her—“revisions of the ruby and the rose,” as she puts it. Read the first two verses of The Vestal and marvel that a young lady of Nathalia’s age should be able to master without effort such a perfectly Emily Dickinsonian idiom. This is no copy; it is something that even Emily Dickinson would not have been at all ashamed to have written. And that is a good deal to say.