Page:The Life and Letters of Emily Dickinson (1924).pdf/49

Rh a marked originality from the first. The last half of the year she had also astronomy and rhetoric, completing the Junior studies.

After her return the little minor note, later so characteristic, comes in when she writes her brother she is getting along nicely in her studies and is "happy, quite, for me." She finished her examination in Euclid without a mistake. Always she was counting the weeks—"Only 22 weeks more!" between her and home; imagining them there, missing herself among them. December 11, 1847, she writes to them on her seventeenth birthday, but it was contrary to the rules to allow the pupils to go home during the term, and only nine weeks before her release she was refused by a teacher who seemed stunned by her request to drive the eight miles over the mountain with her brother. Cramped, curbed, repressed in every natural desire or impulse, her youth seems to us, now, responsible for her later almost wilful love of solitude and the habit of repression, but at the time it was a universal condition applying no less to all her young companions who were more stolidly unconscious of any counter-emotions.

But if Thanksgiving was radiant, Christmas was gloom in comparison, and the legend of Emily's insurrection is one of the best in the family archives. It was only a day in advance that Miss Lyon announced, at morning devotions, that Christmas would be recognized as a fast. The girls were not to leave their rooms through long, definite hours and were to meditate to order. After laying down this unseductive programme she added that the school might rise in token of responsive observation. The school did rise—all except Emily and her roommate. The school sat down and Miss Lyon, appalled by