Page:The Life and Letters of Emily Dickinson (1924).pdf/129

Rh effort was necessary nor was it to her possible to exaggerate the harmony between the Creator and His created child. The adjustment was never broken. She would have spoken to God more simply than to her honorable parent—with less constraint; would have been quite capable of offering God her sweetest flower or her frailest fern, sure of His acceptance.

While to her family religion was a sad and solemn duty, preparing them for death and presided over by a dread and awful Majesty, whose wrath was to be appeased by dreary observance and repeated incantations to remove the curse left by Adam hanging over their innocent and timorous heads—to Emily it was not so at all. They might take her to church and seat her decorously where they sat, like a silent shadow or an inappropriate sunbeam, but from the first word of the prayer till the last word of the benediction, though her body was present, only Emily knew where her soul spent those hours of motionless pause. Hiatus was an art with her, and one she fully employed. There may have been steppingstones in the sermon that caught her back, in her daring the wide flood of her own fancy, but hardly more than that. The devil was her favorite character in the drama of piety, and she invented him even more deliciously than others presented him to her. In him she seemed to recognize an artless but joyous comrade of her own unrelated moments of wit. An untrammelled twain they two, at whom God winked, in true Old Testament fashion.

With a solemn undercurrent truly tragic, too searching and chill to contemplate unmoved, she had the inhuman, elfin strain that has nothing whatever to do with manmade rites or professions. There was a side of her that