Page:The Atlantic Monthly Volume 115.djvu/50

Here is her description of her social life as a girl:—

'We go out very little; once in a month or two we both set sail in silks, touch at the principal points and then put into port again. Vinnie cruises about some to transact commerce, but coming to anchor is most I can do.'

But Aunt Emily's intimacies were not confined to visible friends and family: her books and their authors were a vital part of her everyday life and happiness. On the walls of her own room hung framed portraits of Mrs. Browning, George Eliot, and Carlyle. I well remember the diffident question of an old American retainer assisting in the house at the time of Aunt Emily's death, who asked me, after some hesitation, if those people were 'relatives on the Norcross side,'—adding hastily, 'I knew they could not be Dickinsons, for I have seen all of them, and they are all good-looking.'

I was both glad and sorry to assure her that their greatness was beyond us to claim for either branch of our family tree.

One little note to my mother was simply this line: 'Thank you, dear, for the Eliot. She is the lane to the Indies Columbus was trying to find.'

Again: 'Dreamed of your meeting Tennyson at Ticknor and Fields last night. Where the treasure is there the brain is also.'

She was a fond reader of Ik Marvel; on receiving a copy of Dream Life, she wrote, 'Dream Life is not nearly so great a book as the Reveries of a Bachelor, yet I think it full of the very sweetest fancies, and more exquisite language I defy any man to use. On the whole I enjoyed it very much, but I can't help wishing that he had been translated like Enoch of old, after his bachelor reverie, and chariot of fire and the horsemen thereof were all that had been seen of him ever after.'

When Mr. Howells first appeared in the magazine of which Dr. Holland was then the editor, my mother asked Aunt Emily how it happened, the Hollands being intimate in my grandfather's family. A few nights after, Aunt Emily sent over the following correspondence:—

Doctor,

How did you snare Howells? Emily.

Emily,

Case of bribery. Money did it. Holland.

When the Life and Letters of Samuel Bowles, her life-long friend, were all but published in 1885, she wrote,—

Dear Sue,

I can scarcely believe the wondrous book to be written at last, and it seems like a Memoir of the Sun when the Noon is gone. You remember his swift way of wringing and flinging away a theme, and others picking it up and gazing bewildered after him, and the prance that crossed his eye at such times was unrepeatable. Though the Great Waters sleep, that they are still the Deep we cannot doubt.

Then as if in postscript she adds,—

Unable are the dead to die
For love is immortality,
Nay it is Deity.

The joy of mere words was to Aunt Emily like red and yellow balls to the juggler. The animate verb for the inanimate thing, the ludicrous adjective that turned a sentence mountebank in an instant, the stringing of her meaning like a taut bow with just the economy of verbiage possible, the unusual phrase redeemed from usage by her single selected specimen of her vocabu-