Page:The Life and Letters of Emily Dickinson (1924).pdf/56

32 under the merciless family dosing, her father decided to keep her at home for a year under his own supervision. Already he must have been aware of her brilliant intellect and the powers of her imagination extraordinarily evidenced in all she said or did. As yet there was no hint of her later reclusive tendency, and she sent her young friends off into fits of laughter over her impromptu stories, while her familiarity with the Bible gave her an ease at apt quotation appalling to her elders in its secular application—and jocular yet never of irreverent intent. One who loved her said of her, "Physically timid at the least approach to a crisis in the day's event, her mind dared earth and heaven. That apocrypha and apocalypse met in her explains her tendency so often mistaken for blasphemy by the superficial analyst."

Whatever her docile mother thought about this most unique offspring, whatever her observant father hoped from his older daughter, it was summed up in silence by his decision that Emily should remain at home.

The next years of her life were accordingly passed like those of the other young people of Amherst in the forties, as far as the external went. On what strange adventures she was already led by the wings and fins of her soaring and diving mind even she could not and would not have told.