Martha Dickinson Bianchi

“ What they talked of none can ever know, for the door was shut upon their hours together, and not one member of the family ever dared invade. Their partings overheard were like those of desperate final sundered souls; but both were dramatic of temperament and to Emily the darkness was denser always after the radiant passage of one of her chosen. Helen always preferred Emily in genius and power, and considered herself but a small spark beside her. ”

“ 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?
There were no so gay hours in Emily's life as those spent at her brother's home when there were guests of their own inner circle, who revelled in her companionship. For her own life never lacked its joy in comedy nor was her spirit quenched by its most subduing contact with the elemental tragedy that was constant to her thought. ”

“ Keen and eclectic in her literary tastes, she sifted libraries to Shakespeare and Browning; quick as the electric spark in her intuitions and analyses, she seized the kernel instantly, almost impatient of the fewest words by which she must make her revelation. To her life was rich, and all aglow with God and immortality. With no creed, no formulated faith, hardly knowing the names of dogmas, she walked this life with the gentleness and reverence of old saints, with the firm step of martyrs who sing while they suffer. ”

“ Pompous in manner, elegant in speech, he was to the younger generation the embodiment of the Supreme Court. His face was haughtily handsome, and beneath his slow, awe-inspiring reserve of manner lay a sense of humor to which his little friend Emily pierced unceasingly. Her approach was sure on the high themes of Shakespeare, his favorite author re-read and known by heart by them both, but their enjoyment of the comedy of every day was also broadly akin. ”

“ MARIA WHITNEY
true as steel to friend or conviction, who turned to Emily to probe for her deeper than the schools had been able, and out-soar the obstacles that hindered her own mind. Grey-eyed, pale, keen, crisp of tongue from the habit of clean thought and the study of languages other than her own, their apparent contrast mated unerringly, and they never missed a chance to match discoveries or compare revelations. In those days a free-thinker, a materialist, was almost a felon. For a woman to profess such scepticism was daring beyond credibility. ”

“ She never had time in all the vivid, thrilling, incessant programme of night and day, summer and winter, bird and flower, the terror lest evil overtake her loved ones, the glory in their least success—never stopped in her flying wild hours of inward rapture over a beauty perceived or a winged word caught and spun into the fabric of her thought—to wonder or to care if no one knew she was, or how she proceeded in the behavior of her own small tremendous affair of life. ”

“ There is hardly a soul left now who knew her or ever saw her, and only one of her own family surviving to depict her as not only a poet and mystic, but a beloved person, moving from window to window to watch the day's retreat or the change of light on Pelham hills, or flitting across from house to house, a dear familiar spirit of delight in either. ”

“ Up to the last, when blow after blow had stunned her, Emily kept her vital creative force intact. Watched over by her sister and what Mr. Henry James once called "an archaic Irish servant," she was with difficulty kept at home in the flesh those last years; seeing her brother's family at rarer intervals, and still sending her pencilled messages, among which are the few quoted at random:
Great hungers feed themselves but little hungers ail in vain.
Never mind, dear, trial as a stimulus far exceeds wine though it could hardly be prohibited as a beverage.
A promise is firmer than a hope. ”

“ Later, with her little niece, and the golden-haired arch-darling of both houses—the transitory child, Gilbert, who only came and flashed a mere eight years and went on—Emily was just another child like them, only endowed with subtle powers of the high gods to produce unexpected rewards and avert disastrous consequences. No treat could be offered any one of the 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. ”

“ This may sound like a wild and contradictory claim, but Emily was a unique and universal being; all times, all sympathies, all hopes, all fears, all throbs of timeless hearts beat on in her. Only God and eternity and the dazzling thought of immortality were worth her while, though her patient little hands wrought out their daily ministries in dumb rectitude. ”

“ From girlhood Helen looked up to Emily as something supernatural, and Emily returned her adoration, calling Helen a witch, but never succumbing to her repeated requests for material for publication. Helen Hunt was herself a siren who enchanted all men's hearts—a hopeless coquette from her youth up, worldly where Emily was secluded, expressive while Emily was reserved, a charmer of charmers, who never let go her hold on the hand of the little girl she played with under the syringas, and never lost a chance to come back and warm herself at the fire of that deathless altar. ”

“ It stood on the hill at the head of the village common, swept by the four winds of heaven. Architecture was never thought of or mentioned in those days. The old village church with its Grecian pillars was late in its life a target for any lazy wit, but that it survived beheading once, and lived bravely on in spite of jests, and stands to-day with little external change—rather Grecian in effect—defying its malefactors, bespeaks its integrity of composition. ”

“ Her brother Austin and her younger sister Lavinia were the other children of the home, both possessed of marked ability and varied temperament.
Austin grew up to manhood with much of Emily's poetic quality, fiercely suppressed—a lover of trees and beauty, one with Nature—like her, a hero-worshipper, a partisan, and a lover of all the rare and noble books whose faded brown Ticknor and Fields first editions still stand in deserted ranks on the bookshelves of his own library in his former home at Amherst. ”

“ The social life at Amherst in those early days was no less unique in grace and simplicity than that of Northampton, though differing always in certain social habits held contraband by piety and conscience in Amherst. The harmless cards and dancing common there were not even so much as mentioned at Amherst as suitable or even possible occupations for immortal beings, until a quite recent date. Yet sixty years ago, dear moderns, one could have discovered in the small circle of Amherst as beautiful girls, or "young ladies," as they were then called, as ever graced any drawing room. ”

“ They have all gone that same green path she took, now, and it remains for the last living member of her own family to submit Emily's work to the final judgment of others, and her life, as far as it concerns others, as a beautiful inspiration. For which may her shy soul pardon the revelation; may it never be a betrayal to her spirit, still so vivid and real that to grieve her would be the supreme act of blasphemy against the Holy Ghost, which truly was her guest on this earth. ”

“ To do a magnanimous thing and take oneself by surprise, if one is not in the habit of it, 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 spurned.
The Church dominated all life, social and public, in Amherst in the mid-century, but the religion of Emily Dickinson was not a blend of any she received by inheritance or instruction. ”

“ That man is here!—Father and Mother are away, and I am afraid Emily will go away with him!" But the one word he implored, Emily would not say. Unable to endure his life under the old conditions, after a short time he left his profession and home and silently withdrew with his wife and an only child to a remote city, a continent's width remote, where echo at least could not mock him with its vain outcry: dying prematurely, the spell unbroken. ”

“ The stranger, the foreigner, rich and poor were welcomed there; missionaries, statesmen, scholars, and when Charles Sumner was in Amherst he found with them the only welcome afforded an abolitionist—for the aristocratic salvation of the Nation, as it was then held, lay in the choice of the old Whig Party. How slowly they yielded, those handsome stubborn gentlemen in velvet collars and beaver hats, to the emancipating chariots of the God of battle and Abraham Lincoln! ”

“ Cattle Show was an affair of bucolic sweetness and simplicity, which Emily loved afar; especially the strains of military music on the air, at intervals. It was begun with an address by some distinguished person, and this was followed by a prayer of thanks for the ingathering of the crops. The procession then formed at the Amherst House, an inspiring band leading the way, while mounted escorts, with a military hint in dress and style, cavorted hither and thither. ”

“ Cramped, curbed, repressed in every natural desire or impulse, her youth seems to us, now, responsible for her later almost wilful love of solitude and the habit of repression, but at the time it was a universal condition applying no less to all her young companions who were more stolidly unconscious of any counter-emotions.
But if Thanksgiving was radiant, Christmas was gloom in comparison, and the legend of Emily's insurrection is one of the best in the family archives. It was only a day in advance that Miss Lyon announced, at morning devotions, that Christmas would be recognized as a fast. ”

“ She had a confidence in her, toward heaven, unlike any ever revealed. Though she said of Thomas that "his faith in anatomy was stronger than his faith in faith," her own faith in faith was stronger than any expression she either received or gave, in words.
After her father's death she went about always wondering where he could be, and even to her brother's children saying unforgettable things in her search for a clue to what, and where, he was, and "what kind" he had become. To more than one friend she wrote, "Footlights cannot improve the grave—only immortality." ”

“ Emily is sorry for Susan's day. To be singular under plural circumstances is a becoming heroism.
Susan knows she is a siren and at a word from her Emily would forfeit righteousness.
A spell cannot be tattered and mended like a coat.
No message is the utmost message, for what we tell is done.
To lose what we have never owned might seem an eccentric bereavement, but Presumption has its own affliction as well as claim.
The things of which we want the proof are those we know the best.
Where we owe but little we pay. Where we owe so much it defies money we are blandly insolvent. ”

“ Before one thinks of her as a poet and philosopher or mystic, one must in honesty remember her as an adoring and devoted daughter, a sister loyal to blows, a real nun of the home, without affectation or ritual beyond that of her gentle daily task, and all that she could devise of loving addition to the simple sum. To one who loved her it is unthinkable that she could ever be supposed to have consciously secreted herself, or self-consciously indulged in whim or extravaganza in living, which her fine breeding would have been the first to discard as vulgar and unworthy. ”

“ It was for a long generation overlooked by death, and one passing in and out there thought of old-fashioned times, when parents and children grew up and passed maturity together, in lives of singular uneventfulness unmarked by sad or joyous crises. Very few in the village, except among older inhabitants, knew Miss Emily personally, although the facts of her seclusion and her intellectual brilliancy were familiar Amherst traditions. ”

“ Whatever may in after years have been supposed or surmised was but the idle gossip of any country village provoked by any woman unmarried—especially a gifted girl like Emily Dickinson, whose family were so warmly included in all the society of her time. ”

“ From the time Emily was thirty her life can only be told by the development of herself. Any mere chronicle of events would leave out all that made her and her surviving poems.
Yet if there were few startling happenings to record, to her there was nothing otherwise. If art is as Mérimée once declared "exaggeration apropos"—she was an incomparable artist at life. ”

“ Both personal memory of countless hours with her, and the open-minded re-reading of her poems and family letters lead to the conclusion that awe summed up her attitude toward religion and love toward life. She could write, "To die before one fears to die may be a boon," yet in one hour her wondering conclusion could be swallowed up in the near joy of a little exquisite service for a dear one. ”

“ How dull our lives must seem to the bride and the plighted maiden,—whose days are fed with gold and who gather pearls of evening,—but to the wife, Susie,—sometimes the wife forgotten,—our lives perhaps seem dearer than all others in the world. You have seen flowers at morning satisfied with dew, and these same sweet blossoms at noon with their heads bowed in anguish before the mighty sun,—think you that thirsty blossoms will need nought but dew? No, they will cry for light and pine for the burning noon, though it scorches them, scathes them ”

“ I rise because the sun shines and sleep has done with me. I brush my hair and dress and wonder what I am and who made me so,—and then I help wash the breakfast cups, and—anon wash them again, and then 'tis afternoon and ladies call,—and evening and some members of another line come in to spend the hours, and then the day is done. And prithee what is life? The supper of the heart is when the guest is gone! ”

“ To believe is enough and the right of supposing.
She had never told her family of her writing and they never dared ask. She never showed what she wrote to them. Her timidity awed their love and New England reserve completed the deadlock. Once and only once her sister-in-law published a poem of hers incognita, and when she showed it to Emily, in the darkest, entirest privacy, was terrified for the result of her experiment—the little white moth being almost fluttered to death, all a-tremble and ready to die of the experience and be found on the floor next morning a mere hint of winged dust! ”

“ One of her most madcap escapades occurred one lovely afternoon when, after being driven decorously to the burial of some unknown kinswoman in old Hadley, Emily ran from the open grave with her favorite cousin, a rather dashing young beau from Worcester—connived at his taking her home the long way round through Sunderland, full seven miles in the wrong direction, via his shining buggy and fast black horse, so fast, in fact, that when her parents and retribution caught up with her, she had capped her infamy by being securely locked in her own room at home. ”

“ All through the long, tedious invalidism following, Emily ministered to her with a tenderness as to one also bound for the supernatural and to be cherished as a temporary guest of the heart, already half an angel. Two such calamities shook her belief in stability of this world of hers, where she had been the child of parents permanent and equal to all her natural demand of care and continuance. "The beginning of always is more dreadful than the close—for that is sustained by flickering identity," she wrote her Sister Sue. ”

“ What Emily did succeed in evading and eluding and imagining and believing, and setting down for those who came after her to profit by, was her own performance, dictated by her own need for the solitude in which to write, and the time necessary for thought. ”