As literary editor and critic, lifelong friend and guide or mentor of Emily Dickinson, Thomas Wentworth Higginson once praised and appreciated Dickinson’s poem about a hummingbird, “A Route of Evanescence” (J1463, F1489) by remarking that it was “an exquisite little … strain, every word a picture like this” . (Buckingham, Reception 191) It is Higginson with whom Dickinson began the correspondence, which lasted a quarter of a century. In 1862, Dickinson made a turning-point move for herself as a poet and for the first time in her life Dickinson separated and took her artistic concerns away from her emotional involvements so as to test and check the response to her poetry of one reader who was personally unknown to her but was well established professionally. That was Higginson, who, after her death, had helped to edit the first, best-selling collection of a part of Dickinson’s poems which was published in 1890. Higginson always insisted on the “vividly objective” pictorial qualities of Dickinson’s poetry and recommended Dickinson as a painter rather than a poet in order to promote her poems. He presented all poems of Dickinson’s poetic accounts of natural scenes like “This - is the land - the Sunset washes” (J266, F297) with her vision of the mysteries of death, as distinctive kinds of painting that showed “an extraordinary vividness of descriptive and imaginative power.” (Buckingham, Emily Dickinson 14).