Page:The Atlantic Monthly Volume 115.djvu/46

waited for her messenger, as vigilant as any spider.

She never showed to her own family what she wrote. They never dared ask to see. Her timidity awed their love, and New England reserve completed the deadlock. Once and once only my mother published a poem of hers incognita, and when she showed it to Aunt Emily, in the darkness of entire privacy, she was terrified for the result of her experiment—the little white moth fluttering helplessly, all a-tremble, ready to die of the experience and be found on the floor next morning a mere hint of winged dust.

She seemed to know the world by intuition, but she shrank from its knowing her; not from any feeling of impotence, not because she was deprived of anything or at any disadvantage, but from a fierce unreasoning instinct like that which sends the soft bright-eyed wild things flying from us in the forest.

Yet her love for humanity was unfaltering, and she speaks for all lovers when she writes, 'Twilight touches Amherst with his yellow glove. Miss me sometimes, dear, not on most occasions but in the seldoms of the mind.' And again when she sums life up in her own terms thus: 'The small heart cannot break. The ecstasy of its penalty solaces the large. Emerging from an abyss and reëntering it, that is Life, dear, is it not?' In the following lines does she not argue herself kin to the Bandit in Timon of Athens who claimed 'no time so miserable but a man may be true'? 'To do a magnanimous thing and take one's self by surprise, if one is not in the habit of him, is precisely the finest of joys. Not to do a magnanimous thing, notwithstanding it never be known, notwithstanding it cost us existence, is rapture herself spurn.'

Aunt Emily differed from all the women letter-writers of France and England in her scorn of detail,—scarcely hitting the paper long enough to make her communication intelligible. How her fancy would have careened about the feat of wireless telegraphy, it is a revel to surmise! Sometimes her notes were a brief poem, a mere quatrain, like this,—

Opinion is a flitting thing
But truth outlasts the sun,
If then, we cannot own them both,
Possess the oldest one.

Or this one,—

When we have ceased to crave
The gift is given
For which we gave the earth
And mortgaged heaven,
But so declined in worth—
'Tis ignominy now to look upon.

They were written, of course, apropos of universal or neighborhood events in their own epoch, but their application did not stop there. Who has not experienced the overtaking of fate as she has put it in these terse four lines?

It stole along so stealthy,
Suspicion it was done
Was dim as to the wealthy
Beginning not to own!

Life had for her an infinite and increasing fascination. 'Are you sure we are making the most of it?' she wrote on a slip of paper and sent over by hand, just because she was quick with the thrill of another day. Again she sent the following,—

Dear Sue,

A fresh morning of life and its impregnable chances, and the dew for you! Emily.

Again this single exclamation: 'O matchless Earth, we underrate the chance to dwell in thee!'

Her devotion to those she loved was that of a knight for his lady. I quote a few of her letters for their depth of feeling and human appeal.