The dictionary was no mere reference book to her; she read it as a priest his breviary—over and over, page by page, with utter absorption. Emile Hennequin said, "Words are visions, visions ecstatic, visions chimerical, without models, without objects; ideals rather than images, desires rather than reminiscences." And Emily:
A little overflowing word,
That any hearing had inferred
For ardor or for tears,
Though Generations pass away,
Traditions ripen and decay,
As eloquent appears.
Although she never went to live in it except in spirit, the world was Emily's real neighborhood. George Eliot's works she called "that lane to the Indies Columbus was trying to find." Longfellow, Tennyson, the Brownings, Socrates, Plato, Poe, and the Bible sift through her conversation; Keats and Holmes, Ik Marvel, Hawthorne—"who appals and entices"—Howells and Emerson, Sir Thomas Browne, De Quincey, George Sand, Lowell—whose "Winter" enthralled her for days at a time she declared—and perhaps differently from all the rest the Brontës, all three, Charlotte, Anne, and Emily! Shakespeare always and forever, Othello her chosen villain, with Macbeth familiar as the neighbors and Lear driven into exile as vivid as if occurring on the hills before her door. She "watched like a vulture for Cross's 'Life' of his wife," the criticism and joy of literature running through her letters as her conversation.
She always read Frank Sanborn's letters in the columns of the "Springfield Republican" for their reflection of the
