Page:The Life and Letters of Emily Dickinson (1924).pdf/45

Rh One such glimpse of her variability of expression occurs in the following:

I have thought of you all day and I fear of but little else and when I was gone to Meeting you filled up my mind so full I couldn't find a chink to put the worthy pastor in, when he said "Our Heavenly Father," I said "O darling Sue!" When he read the One Hundredth psalm I kept saying your precious letter over to myself, and Susie, when they sang it would have made you laugh to hear one little voice piping to the departed. I made up words and kept singing how I loved you—and you had gone away—while all the rest of the choir were singing the Halleluyah! I presume nobody heard me because I am so small, but it was a comfort to feel I might put them all out singing of you. I am not there though this afternoon, because I am here, writing this letter to you.

What a darling vision she makes of herself, shy and small and heart-broken for her idol, singing against the volume of the established order of worship at the top of her little chirp, intrepid of consequences if overheard. Something of the later dissenting Emily is foreshadowed in every gesture of her early mind.

The daily four-horse stage that ran between Amherst and Northampton left quite early in the morning, and brought up with much cracking of the whip before the post-office at exactly five in the afternoon. There were no trains or trolleys or motors in those days, so she was driven to South Hadley in state, by her father, and left there alone for the first time in her life out in the strange, wide world; the Holyoke range shutting her away from all the geography of her previous existence more obdurately than any remote distance of modem latitude and longitude could devise.