Sister
Please excuse Santa Claus for calling so early, but gentlemen 1882 years old are a little fearful of the evening air.
And in the early days of the very last spring of her life, to Gib the characteristic lines:
Not at home to callers
Says the naked tree—
Jacket due in April.
Wishing you good day.
There are still endless little notes sent in every possible phase of her mood. Comments on books she read, cries of the heart, dashes of wit; and when her habit of writing became confirmed, poems for suggestion, or criticism. From the time Emily had taken the dare of thirty, that "frightful age" spoken of with bated breath in their teens by her sister Lavinia, the notes were often those same poems afterward published, sent either as an expression of an emotion she wished to share, or with a request for criticism.
In an article upon her unpublished letters to her brother's family, which appeared in the "Atlantic Monthly," it has been told of her that these notes
contained numberless phrases of universal truth, written though they were by this shy recluse in her retired New England home, intrenched by lilacs and guarded by bumble bees.... She had her finger on the pulse of events and noted phenomena unerringly, with her own comment. Whenever stirred, by whatever cause, she trapped her mood, then waited for her messenger, as vigilant as any spider.... Emily Dickinson 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.
The following brief note is quoted from the same source:
