Page:The Life and Letters of Emily Dickinson (1924).pdf/67



Emily was passing through the first quiet years between her school days and her momentous visit to Washington and Philadelphia, there were passages in several letters from her which revealed something of her inner experience.

It was just before her twentieth birthday that she wrote:

You and I have been strangely silent upon one topic, Susie. We have often touched upon it and as quickly fled away,—as children shut their eyes when the sun is too bright for them. I have always hoped to know if you had no dear fancy illumining all your life, no one of whom you murmured in the faithful ear of night, and at whose side you walked in fancy the livelong day. How dull our lives must seem to the bride and the plighted maiden,—whose days are fed with gold and who gather pearls of evening,—but to the wife, Susie,—sometimes the wife forgotten,—our lives perhaps seem dearer than all others in the world. You have seen flowers at morning satisfied with dew, and these same sweet blossoms at noon with their heads bowed in anguish before the mighty sun,—think you that thirsty blossoms will need nought but dew? No, they will cry for light and pine for the burning noon, though it scorches them, scathes them; they have got through with peace. They know that the sun of noon is mightier than the morning and their life is henceforth for him. Oh, Susie, it is dangerous and it is all too dear,—those simple trusting spirits and the spirits mightier we cannot resist! It does so rend me, the thought of it,—when it comes, that I tremble lest at some time I too am yielded up. You will forgive my amatory strain,—it has been a very long one.

She writes again in fun, with a touch of the same