Page:The Life and Letters of Emily Dickinson (1924).pdf/68

44, however, "I miss the grasshoppers much—but suppose it is all for the best—I should become too much attached to a trotting world," betraying a poignant certainty of her own stifled capacity for life that persists like an organ note held down, torturing the silence with its insistence. Even from extreme youth her unconscious philosophy seems to have been one of renunciation before the temptation was presented; the fear of loving what she could not have driving her to self-imposed abnegations. As if she knew by intuition all the possible devastation of love as well as all the loneliness without it—she seems to have fled within herself like an eremite to his altar. A premonition of the beauty and mystery and power of living seems to have grappled with her—another angel wrestler without face or familiarity—and all but worsted her, before she was confronted by her own actual ordeal.

Every fatal possibility seems to have hovered about her, every small day been big with monstrous approachings. Her intimate letters at this time, too sacred for revealing, show her as one who fled from a suspected wonder lest seeing it she faint to possess it and be lost. She knew and trembled for her own guess at life—was loath to admit it, lest failing it she lose hold on all there was left. She put so much of her own supernatural imagination into a person or event or just the ordinary weather, that few if any other minds could have conceived the voltage of her impressions or reactions. To her the death of some nameless neighbor opened an abyss of conjecture; a sudden fire, though it might be only a small shed burning behind a yellow barn, set the elements loose and sent her off into the Book of Revelation and the Day