DEAR FRIEND,—I felt it shelter to speak to you. My brother and sister are with Mr. Bowles, who is buried this afternoon. The last song that I heard—that was, since the birds—was “He leadeth me, he leadeth me; yea, though I walk”—then the voices stooped, the arch was so low. After this added bereavement the inward life of the diminished household became only more concentrated, and the world was held farther and farther away. Yet to this period belongs the following letter, written about 1880, which has more of what is commonly called the objective or external quality than any she ever wrote me; and shows how close might have been her observation and her sympathy, had her rare qualities taken a somewhat different channel:— DEAR FRIEND,—I was touchingly reminded of [a child who had died] this morning by an Indian woman with gay baskets and a dazzling baby, at the kitchen door. Her little boy “once died,” she said, death to her dispelling him. I asked her what the baby liked, and she said “to step.” The prairie before the door was gay with flowers of hay, and I led her in. She argued with the birds, she leaned on clover walls and they fell, and dropped her. With jargon sweeter than a bell, she grappled buttercups, and they sank together, the buttercups the heaviest. What sweetest use of days! ’Twas noting some such scene made Vaughan humbly say,— “My days that are at best but dim and hoary.” I think it was Vaughan.... And these few fragmentary memorials—closing, like every human biography, with funerals, yet with such as were to Emily Dickinson only the stately introduction to a higher life—may well end with her description of the death of the very summer she so loved. “As imperceptibly as grief The summer lapsed away, Too imperceptible at last To feel like perfidy. “A quietness distilled, As twilight long begun, Or Nature spending with herself Sequestered afternoon. “The dusk drew earlier in, The morning foreign shone, A courteous yet harrowing grace As guest that would be gone. “And thus without a wing Or service of a keel Our summer made her light escape Into the Beautiful.” XX JULIA WARD HOWE JULIA WARD HOWE