CHAPTER VII
LATER YEARS WITH BOOKS AND FRIENDS
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. To her there was a prodigality of excess in each thrill of the returning common day. Her spirit found its own nectars in spite of her loneliness for all her brother's home so vividly illustrated—in spite of the dearth of music, painting, and the stimulus others took for granted as necessary for any lasting accomplishment.
A brilliant and ardent admirer of her work said recently: "The truest vision I ever got of the great Napoleon was in hearing a great artist sing the 'Two Grenadiers.' That is the only way possible of expressing Emily Dickinson—by indirections, through her own milieu, her contacts with others, and the impressions she set down in her writings." 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.
