Page:The Life and Letters of Emily Dickinson (1924).pdf/74

50 Shrouded— In a day Tri-Victory— "My Husband" Women say Stroking the melody. Is this the way?

In her own words, Emily had "got through with peace."

And since there is no portrait of her, except one made from her child face in the group mentioned, and another of extreme youth rather too freely restored to give much idea of her, perhaps it would not be amiss to quote the likeness in words from the preface to the volume of her verse called "The Single Hound":

It has been told often of her that she wore white exclusively. She had said herself in one of her letters to an inquisitive friend who had never yet seen her and importuned for a hint of her outward self,—that her eyes were the color of the sherry left in the glass by him to whom she wrote. Her hair was of that same warm bronze-chestnut hue that Titian immortalized, and she wore it parted on her brow and low in her neck, but always half covered by a velvet snood of the same tint,—such as the Venetian painters loved to add as a final grace to their portraits of their most beloved and beautiful women. Her cheek was like the petal of the jasmine, a velvety white never touched by a hint of color. Her red lips parted over regular little teeth like a squirrel's, and it was the rather long upper lip that gave to the mouth its asceticism and betrayed the monastic tendency in her, that austerity of the senses of which she was probably quite unaware. If this combines nature and art and mysticism in one, too bewilderingly to reproduce any definite impression, it is the fault of that face—as animate in memory as it is still in dreams.

She had a dramatic way of throwing up her hands at the