Page:The Life and Letters of Emily Dickinson (1924).pdf/115

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His reply came back:

Her books and authors were a vital part of her happiness. On the walls of her own room hung framed portraits of Mrs. Browning, George Eliot, and Carlyle. If only Emily could have heard the question an old family retainer, assisting at the time of Emily's death, asked diffidently, after some hesitation, if they were "relatives on the Norcross side"; adding hastily, "I know they can't be Dickinsons, for I have seen all of them and they are all good-looking."

In writing her letters to friends at a distance, she seems to show an accumulated sadness which in her intercourse with those about her she rarely if ever permitted expression. No one of her family in either house ever associated her with sadness or any tendency toward indulgence of heaviness of spirit, though solemnity was her normal attitude toward life and like those golden Florentines "she was eternally preoccupied with death."

From the death of Samuel Bowles in 1878 life lost its original sense of certainty. And when her father died in Boston during the June of 1879, the very foundations trembled under her. He was stricken in the House of the Legislature, where he had gone to serve the local interests of his town, and died without recovering consciousness, at the Tremont House, before any of his family could reach him. Her brother Austin had to break the news to