Page:The Life and Letters of Emily Dickinson (1924).pdf/21

Rh thought of Emily Dickinson at all; never supposed any one watched her way of living or worshipping or acting. She never had time in all the vivid, thrilling, incessant programme of night and day, summer and winter, bird and flower, the terror lest evil overtake her loved ones, the glory in their least success—never stopped in her flying wild hours of inward rapture over a beauty perceived or a winged word caught and spun into the fabric of her thought—to wonder or to care if no one knew she was, or how she proceeded in the behavior of her own small tremendous affair of life.

Her heredity is distinctly traced for nine generations in America. Her first local ancestor settled in old Hadley and a later generation was one of the founders of the church and town of Amherst. There were Dickinsons mentioned in Hadley among the first letters of the original Indian grants in 1659. And when in 1714 the order was given for five men to superintend the erection of a new meeting-house in the middle of two streets, one of them was a Dickinson. There was also an ancestor in the famous "Shays's Rebellion" in 1786. Before that, in England, the stock from which she came was clear for thirteen generations more. Further than that her father's curiosity or pride had never gone in research.

Her own grandfather, Samuel Fowler Dickinson, was the first of her direct line in Amherst. His connection with the establishment of Amherst Academy, from which the College later sprang, is familiar local history. In his fervor for "the in-bringing of the Kingdom" he foresaw the universal education of ministers, and calculated the millennium in the near future of "about seven years." He was educated at Dartmouth College, a man