Page:The Life and Letters of Emily Dickinson (1924).pdf/80

54 three like that of being left in her care while the grown-up family wandered. As they grew older, she made companions of them, talked to them as equals, trusted them with her choicest interests. To them her increasing solitude never seemed strange; love gave them understanding. Had she worn wings instead of her simple white frocks, they would have taken it quite for granted.

Until she was obliged to go to Boston for treatment of her eyes in 1864 and again in 1865 the events in Emily's life were counted as with Shakespeare's clock—"by heart-throbs, not by hours."

As her brother's family grew up, she accepted them one by one, an individual relation existing between each of the three and her fairy self. When her little niece began her first attempts to write her own fancies in verse, Emily's response came quickly back, "I was surprised, but why? Is she not of the lineage of the spirit?" She always alluded to the youngest son, Gilbert, as "Thy Son, our Nephew." As she put the world further from her their triple alliance increased in intimacy. She hailed them as treading where she dared not venture, bade them come back and tell her their adventures, was curious about their thoughts and tiny events which gave her escape from her own limited environment, which she loved, yet endured.

Though she dwelt only "a hedge away" from their home, she had the habit of sending her constant thought to them in her tiny notes as other people would have spoken them. The gambol of her mind on paper was her pastime. Sometimes her mood was one of sheer extravaganza—like this: