AET. 25.] TO R. W. EMERSON. 63
comforter. If you like to receive a letter from me, too, I am glad, for it gives me pleasure to write. But don’t let it come amiss; it must fall as harmlessly as leaves settle on the landscape. I will tell you what we are doing this now. Supper is done, and Edith—the dessert, perhaps more than the dessert—is brought in, or even comes in per se; and round she goes, now to this altar, and then to that, with her monosyllabic invocation of "oc," "oc." It makes me think of "Langue d oc." She must belong to that province. And like the gypsies she talks a language of her own while she understands ours. While she jabbers Sanscrit, Parsee, Pehlvi, say "Edith go bah!" and "bah" it is. No intelligence passes between us. She knows. It is a capital joke, that is the reason she smiles so. How well the secret is kept! she never descends to explanation. It is not buried like a common secret, bolstered up on two sides, but by an eternal silence on the one side, at least. It has been long kept, and comes in from the unexplored horizon, like a blue mountain range, to end abruptly at our door one day. (Don t stumble at this steep simile.) And now she studies the heights and depths of nature
On shoulders whirled in some eccentric orbit
Just by old Pææstum’s temples and the perch
Where Time doth plume his wings.
