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Purple ribaldry—a revel it must have been to her when that adjective caught her.
In an exhaustive review of her in the Revue des Deux Mondes entitled "La Vie Secrète d'Une Puritaine, Emily Dickinson," it is exciting to see how she sparkles in the exact language of science and court, which adds a cutting to her gems that leaves our blunter English dim by comparison.
Metaphor is her characteristic figure, of course, and it could never be too terse for her liking; for which reason some of her admirers who are Oriental scholars long to see her consummate in the concentrated and permanent forms of the Chinese. Her letters are the record of her external life, her poems the journal of her mind and soul—where they went—what happened to them.
She has been given a wide range of labels by her reviewers, from the "Modern Sappho" to a "Hermit Thrush"; from a "New England Nun" to "an Epigrammatic Walt Whitman." One Reverend Father of a most holy Order declares: "Emily is Malchizedeck, without father, without mother, without descent; having neither beginning nor end of life; born not after the law of carnal commandment but after the power of an endless life."
