Page:The Life and Letters of Emily Dickinson (1924).pdf/20

4 's ancestors undeviatingly worshipped. There was no allowance made in her family for oddity—temperament had not been discovered yet. There was no exception to what was expected of each of the children alike, her sister Lavinia, her brother Austin, and herself. What Emily did succeed in evading and eluding and imagining and believing, and setting down for those who came after her to profit by, was her own performance, dictated by her own need for the solitude in which to write, and the time necessary for thought. She was spared none of her share in the household duties, nor did she wish to be.

Before one thinks of her as a poet and philosopher or mystic, one must in honesty remember her as an adoring and devoted daughter, a sister loyal to blows, a real nun of the home, without affectation or ritual beyond that of her gentle daily task, and all that she could devise of loving addition to the simple sum. To one who loved her it is unthinkable that she could ever be supposed to have consciously secreted herself, or self-consciously indulged in whim or extravaganza in living, which her fine breeding would have been the first to discard as vulgar and unworthy. It was her absorption in her own world that made her unaware often of the more visible world of those who never see beyond it. It was not that she was introspective, egoistic, and selfish—rather that she dwelt so far out in the changing beauty of Nature, in the loves and joys and sorrows of the dear ones she held closest, in the simple drama of the neighborhood, and most of all the stupendous and sometimes revealing wonder of life and death and the Almighty God thundered at her from the high pulpit on Sundays—and known so differently in her own soul the other days of the week—that she never