Page:The Life and Letters of Emily Dickinson (1924).pdf/118

86 many fanciful tales of a red carpet spread before her when she went beyond the door.

It is at this time she wrote:

There is no first or last in Forever. It is Centre there all the time. To believe is enough and the right of supposing.

She had never told her family of her writing and they never dared ask. She never showed what she wrote to them. Her timidity awed their love and New England reserve completed the deadlock. Once and only once her sister-in-law published a poem of hers incognita, and when she showed it to Emily, in the darkest, entirest privacy, was terrified for the result of her experiment—the little white moth being almost fluttered to death, all a-tremble and ready to die of the experience and be found on the floor next morning a mere hint of winged dust! She seemed to know the world from intuition, but to shrink from that which sends the soft bright-eyed things flying from us in the forest. All the while she was writing and selecting and tying up her poems in slender packages with a single thread, another Lady of Shalott at her subtler tapestries that were to amaze her readers when her little boat had drifted down to Camelot forever.

"There's substance here" might have been truly said of her mentality, even when the supernatural began to outweigh the actual in her consideration. This was no empty yearning after a lost romance, no idle acceptance of passivity. Up to the last, when blow after blow had stunned her, Emily kept her vital creative force intact. Watched over by her sister and what Mr. Henry James once called "an archaic Irish servant," she was with difficulty kept at home in the flesh those last years; seeing her brother's family at rarer intervals, and still sending