Page:The Life and Letters of Emily Dickinson (1924).pdf/131

Rh This may sound like a wild and contradictory claim, but Emily was a unique and universal being; all times, all sympathies, all hopes, all fears, all throbs of timeless hearts beat on in her. Only God and eternity and the dazzling thought of immortality were worth her while, though her patient little hands wrought out their daily ministries in dumb rectitude. She moved about with a rapt manner at her simplest duties, making the bread her father loved best from her hands, or the exquisite caramels she sent to her favored ones, and the large sunny kitchen, with its windows both to the east and west, saw her often standing with her listening manner, of Domremy, sharing "the voices," perhaps, of a less troubled, less martial throng of phantoms; apparitions of her own thought and fancy. This, it must be confessed, led sometimes to catastrophe, but flight was ever her imminent salvation and mute defense.

Only her wit flew over the walls that hedged her in. And this even beat against high heaven at times, but with never a sacrilegious intention and almost a certainty innate that even her Father in heaven could be trusted to enjoy her sally into the uncharted dark where angels dared not go. She had a confidence in her, toward heaven, unlike any ever revealed. Though she said of Thomas that "his faith in anatomy was stronger than his faith in faith," her own faith in faith was stronger than any expression she either received or gave, in words.

After her father's death she went about always wondering where he could be, and even to her brother's children saying unforgettable things in her search for a clue to what, and where, he was, and "what kind" he had become. To more than one friend she wrote, "Footlights