Page:The Life and Letters of Emily Dickinson (1924).pdf/51

Rh non compos in a man's world of reality. A friend who wrote her of meeting Daniel Webster at this time provoked the retort, "You don't know General Briggs, and I do, so you are no better off than I."

In an echo of this same spirit she exclaimed at the end of a letter to Susan Gilbert at Baltimore, the year before her marriage in 1856:

P.S. Why can't I be a delegate to the great Whig Convention? Don't I know all about Daniel Webster and the Tariff and the Law? Then, Susie, I could see you during a pause in the session, but I don't like this country at all and I shan't stay here any longer! Delenda est America! Massachusetts and all!

From another letter written later in the same year:

I count the days. I do long for the time when I can count the hours—without incurring the charge of Femina insania. I made up the Latin, dear Susie, for I could not think how it went in Stoddard and Anderson!

But if South Hadley in the forties denied political interest to women, it suppressed any idle amatory inclination with an equally firm hand, though not altogether successfully. The sending of those "foolish notes called Valentines" was forbidden by Miss Lyon under penalty. But according to Emily, she was outwitted by an elaborate system of bribery including the village postmaster, and some hundred and fifty were received in that February of '49 in spite of the prohibitory edict.

In May, owing to a temporary bad cough that terrified her father, Emily was taken home, much against her will, but kept up with her studies and was able to return to South Hadley at the beginning of the summer term. Meantime she was reading every sort of prose and poetry, mentioning as her especial favorites, "Evangeline,"