Page:The Life and Letters of Emily Dickinson (1924).pdf/52

28 "The Princess," "The Maiden Aunt," "The Epicurean," and "The Twins and Heart," by Tupper.

With this exception she was always well, and delighted in nothing more than long wanderings in the woods with her young friends. She knew exactly where the first faint arbutus clung to the grey rock under a protecting bank in Pelham, and the wet, inaccessible spot the rare yellow violets chose as their home in the South Amherst swamp; the columbine and adder's-tongues had their own haunts fixed in her mind, and she could walk straight to the trillium, the bloodroot, even the pink lady's-slipper, as if their homes had street and number. There was no faint frail evidence of the shy New England spring that was not rejoiced over by this flower-sister, hardly less a creature of Nature than they.

After leaving the Seminary for good, in 1848, she reëntered the Amherst Academy: as the wit of the school, becoming humorist of the comic column of a paper edited by the girls of the school, called "Forest Leaves." Her life was stirred by all the mild gaieties of Amherst, the little social ripples which came at long intervals and which she anticipated with the rest. A party at Professor Tyler's, or the rumor of one to come at Professor Hazen's, filled them all with girlish zest, and Commencement always threw the town into a spasm. "Everything will soon be all in a buzz," was her way of expressing the universal premonitory excitement, that caught her like the rest.

One letter hitherto unprinted gives her mood after coming home to stay:

Sunday—I haven't any paper, dear, but faith continues firm. Presume if I met with my deserts I should receive nothing.