Page:The Atlantic Monthly Volume 115.djvu/48

'"But was n't she running pretty fast?"

'"Well, some fast and some slow," said the beguiling Villain.

'Pussy's Nemesis quailed. Talk of hoary reprobates! Your urchin is more antique in wiles than the Egyptian Sphinx. Have you noticed Granville's letter to Lowell?

'"Her Majesty has contemplated you and reserved her decision!"'

In response to some dainty carried to her by my brother Gilbert, she writes, 'What an Embassy! What an Ambassador! "And pays the heart for what his eyes eat only."^[1] Excuse the bearded pronoun.'

It was but one of many illustrations of her familiarity with Shakespeare that kept us as children in excited research for her context. It was, as Colonel Higginson once remarked to me, 'a pretty rarified atmosphere for children not in their teens'; but we regarded Aunt Emily as a magical creature and were proud to be included among her grown-up friends and treated accordingly. We were brought up on her condensed forms and subtle epigram, her droll humor and stabbing pathos, until we felt a lively contempt for people who 'could not understand' Aunt Emily, when our mother read out sentences or poems of hers to guests who begged to hear something she had written. We felt she was always on our side, a nimble as well as loving ally. She never dulled our sunshine with grown-up apprehensions for our good, or hindered our imagination, but rather flew before us like the steeds of Aurora,—straight out into the ether of the Impossible,—as dear to her as to us.

The following she sent my brother Ned after some reputed indiscretion reported of him by harder hearts:—

The cat that in the corner sits
Her martial time forgot—
The rat but a tradition now
Of her desireless lot,
Another class reminds me of—
Who neither please nor play,
But—'not to make a bit of noise'—
Adjure each little boy!

P.S.—Grandma characteristically hopes Neddy will be good boy. Obtuse ambition of Grandma's! Emily.

On returning the photograph of a child in Kate Greenaway costume she wrote,—

'That is the little girl I always meant to be and was n't; the very hat I meant to wear and did n't!'

One verse she sent us which particularly hit our fancy was the following:

The butterfly in honored dust
Assuredly will lie,
But none will pass his catacomb
So chastened as the fly.

Here is one she sent us at Christmas time, with one of her beautifully iced cakes:—

The next one she sent to my brother Gilbert, a child in kindergarten, accompanied by a dead bumble-bee:—

For Gilbert to carry to his Teacher from Emily

The Bumble-Bee's Religion

His little hearse-like figure
Unto itself a dirge,
To a delusive lilac
The vanity divulge
Of industry and morals
And every righteous thing,
For the divine perdition
Of idleness and Spring.