Page:The Life and Letters of Emily Dickinson (1924).pdf/69

Rh of Judgment. A perfidy always distracted her, whether national or private—disloyalty she could never conceive or admit. As with Keats her "angel nerves" were ill adapted for any higher vibrations than the old house afforded with its safe routine, quite electric enough for her sensitive transmission.

Always, when a circus was to pass her window in the first grey dawn on its hooded way from town to town, she sat up all night to watch for it, thrilled by its wild vagrancy, its pathos, its utter sophistication: hungry for sensation, starving for a world she later shunned, with a vague dread of its haunting power over her. Characteristic of her shy hidden self is her explanation: If the archangels veil their faces— Sacred diffidence my own attitude. And again:

Perhaps there is never quite the sorcery that it is to surmise—though the obligation to enchantment is always binding.

So the years following her South Hadley experiences passed externally uneventful, until in 1853 Emily spent a winter in Washington with her father, who was in Congress for two terms to serve a special cause, and not from personal political ambition. He took his family and they stayed at Willard's, where Emily was at once recognized as unique by men much her senior. Her father had misgivings as to her being willing to go, as already she shrank peculiarly from being away from home, but his wish seems to have inspired her. There are many tales of her repartee still remembered.

She is said to have astonished some of her father's friends by her insight into men and affairs, and created quite a sensation by her wit. One story of her, handed