Page:The Life and Letters of Emily Dickinson (1924).pdf/113

Rh art and literature of his period, and was glad a friend heard Rubinstein for her, adding "he makes me think of polar nights." She mentioned her sister as "Vinnie, spectacular as Disraeli and sincere as Gladstone," and alludes to "a new pussy the colour of Bramwell Brontë's hair." One gets her feeling for Wordsworth by one of these oblique slants when she remembers her cousin's sitting-room at the Berkeley "as the poet's thought of Windymere."

"David Copperfield" was published when she was twenty-one, and Dickens was always a favorite of her father's, so that many of the expressions used in his stories became household words. "Donkeys, Davy," was flung back over Emily's shoulder as she fled from unwelcome visitors. The drollery of Dickens was congenial to her sense of the ludicrous, and "Barkis is willin'" was a message carried more than once by the children between her and their mother without any realization of its import.

She was keenly interested in the Egyptian campaign of Arabi Pasha against the allied French and English, alluding to his defeat at Tel-el-Kebir, after the bombardment of Alexandria, with a grasp of European affairs and interest in their great statesmen unique among the women of her day, who chiefly overheard their newspaper information at scattered male dictation. "Will you have Theophilus or Junius?" she offers Mr. Bowles for a birthday gift. He called her his Rascal—with a gleam in his eyes in speaking of her like that of freshets breaking loose. "Part angel, part demon," he said once, when she refused to see him after he had driven over from Springfield for that peculiar pleasure. It was his custom to bring