Page:The Life and Letters of Emily Dickinson (1924).pdf/109

Rh true as steel to friend or conviction, who turned to Emily to probe for her deeper than the schools had been able, and out-soar the obstacles that hindered her own mind.

Grey-eyed, pale, keen, crisp of tongue from the habit of clean thought and the study of languages other than her own, their apparent contrast mated unerringly, and they never missed a chance to match discoveries or compare revelations. In those days a free-thinker, a materialist, was almost a felon. For a woman to profess such scepticism was daring beyond credibility. The sincerity of the troubled inability "to believe" was undoubted in this case, and it must have set Emily off on boundless conjecture, encountered at such close and resolute range.

But after all her faithful devotion to her friends of girlhood is cited, those she professed profligate-hearted from start to finish of her solitary life, there was but one to whom she entrusted the secret of her self. Many instances are in existence still of her referring to her sister-in-law's judgment in all literary matters. The poem called "A Syllable" in the published collection was originally written with a second verse: Could any mortal lip divine The elemental freight Of undeveloped syllable 'Twould crumble with the weight, The prey of unknown zones, The pillage of the sea, These tabernacles of the mind That told the news to me.

The poem which published reads "A modest lot, a fame petite," originally had a first verse sent with it: A little bread, a crust, a crumb, A little trust, a demijohn,