Page:The Life and Letters of Emily Dickinson (1924).pdf/132

100 cannot improve the grave—only immortality." And no acting of tragedy in later years ever effaced the memory of her husky whisper, "Where is he? Emily will find him!"

It was of her mother after her death that she wrote later with less rebellion, "Like a flake gathered by the wind she is now part of the drift called Infinity. We don't know where she is, though so many tell us," expressing her maturing doubt of the infallibility of that high pulpit to divulge what her heart cried out to know. There was far more, then, that was native to Emily's feeling for the Eternal in the prayer of Saint Augustine: "O Truth who art Eternity! And Love who art Truth! And Eternity who art Love! Thou art my God, to Thee do I Sigh night and day."

While her work still fascinated her, there came a morning in June, 1884, when without warning Emily was smitten as her father before her, and though she lived for two years after,

and it was impossible for her to write more than an occasional pencilled note. She wrote her Sister Sue at this time, "You must let me go first, Sue, because I live in the sea always now, and know the road."

When the better days came, she still took out her writing and made her last corrections, playing with her beloved iridescent words to the last, but, in her own words, reminiscent of an oft-repeated family caution, "it was already growing damp"—"I must go in, the fog is rising," she warned, at the end of her briefest last