Page:The Life and Letters of Emily Dickinson (1924).pdf/43

Rh was taken, as she herself declares, "On top of the State House and almost everywhere else you can imagine!"

All the next spring she was fitting to go to South Hadley Seminary, studying algebra, Euclid, ecclesiastical history, and reviewing arithmetic. She was always in love with her teachers at that time, quite regardless of their being men or women, but whatever there was fanciful or romantic in her girl imagination she was surely grounded as firmly in the uncompromising fundamentals of education as her Puritan father saw fit to have her. Her anticipations were boundless and she only feared the sky would fall before the plan was realized. It had been in her dreams for a long time, yet she felt that it was part of her own nature always to anticipate more than to realize; a curious instinct in one so entirely normal with life just opening before her.

Her brother Austin had entered Amherst College the year before, and at his first commencement she describes herself as "now very tall and wearing long dresses." One of her quaintest sentences slips in here between childhood and girlhood: "I have perfect confidence in God and His promises—and yet I know not why, I feel the world has a predominant place in my affections."

The sweet secluded pleasures she shared—those pensive yet wistful glances at life, with shy though resolute eyes—may best be understood from one of her letters just a few days before she went to South Hadley in the fall of 1847. A picture this, scarcely to be reproduced:

Mattie Gilbert was here last evening and we sat on the front door steps and talked about life and love and whispered our childish fancies about such blissful things, the evening was gone so soon—and I walked home with Mattie beneath the silent