Page:The Life and Letters of Emily Dickinson (1924).pdf/55

Rh much evidence of its instructive value against like dereliction under equally provocative circumstances.

In December she wrote to Sue:

There is a tall pale snowstorm stalking through the fields and bowing at my window. I shan't let the fellow in! Went to church today in second best and boots, sermon from Dr. D. on unbelief. "Another Esau." Sermons on unbelief ever did attract me.

Her shyness, her shrinking from anything she could not explain or reason with, comes out in her droll description of going to church alone when her family were called to an obliging funeral which gave her a day of rare liberty. She says she went in circles puzzling Euclid:

When I reached the steps I smiled to think of my geometry during the journey—how big and broad the aisle looked,—full huge enough before,—as I quaked along up and reached my usual seat. There I sat and sighed and wondered I was so scared, for surely there was nothing I need fear in the whole world,—yet there the phantom was, though I kept resolving to be brave as Turks and bold as Polar bears, it would not help me any. After the opening prayer I ventured to look around. Mr. Carter immediately looked at me. Mr. Sweetser attempted to do so, but I discovered Nothing, up in the sky somewhere, and gazed intensely at it for quite a half an hour—

How I did wish for you or Vinnie and Goliath or Sampson to pull the whole church down—requesting Dr. D. to step into Miss K.'s until the worst was past. Professor Aaron Warner—Professor of Rhetoric in Amherst College—preached this afternoon. I shall be disappointed if Horace Walpole does not address us this evening. If you stay away another Sabbath the Secretary of War will take charge of the Sabbath School. The singing reminded me of the legend of Jack and Jill allowing the bass viol to be typified by Jill, who literally tumbled after, while Jack, i.e., the Choir, galloped insanely on.

She never went back to South Hadley, for although the cough of the winter before had entirely succumbed