“I often go Home in thought to you”: ED to TWH, [February 1876], Letters, 2:548.
“It makes me happy to send you the Book”: ED to TWH, [February 1876], Letters, 2:548.
The one they called “Immortality” “I believed it would”: ED to TWH, [spring 1876], Letters, 2:551. Thomas Johnson conjectures that the poem is “‘Faithful to the end’ amended.” I have my doubts.
“You once told me”: ED to TWH, [February 1876], Letters, 2:548.
“I was lonely”: ED to TWH, [spring 1876], Letters, 2:551.
“I sued the News—yet feared—the News”: Fr 1391.
“The things we thought that we should do”: Fr 1279.
“I wish your friend had my strength”: ED to TWH, [spring 1876], Letters, 2:551.
“May I cherish it twice”: ED to MCH, [spring 1876], Letters, 2:554.
“I am glad to have been”: ED to TWH, [spring 1876], Letters, 2:553.
“a little Granite Book you can lean upon”: ED to MCH, [December 1876], Letters, 2:569.
“I am glad if I did not”: ED to MCH, [August 1876], Letters, 2:558.
“Your letters always surprise me”: ED to TWH, [June 1869], Letters, 2:186.
“I hoped you might show me something of your’s”: ED to TWH, [August 1877], Letters, 2:588.
“Thank you for having written the ‘Atlantic Essays’”: ED to TWH, [November 1871], Letters, 2:491.
“I was re-reading ‘Oldport’”: ED to TWH, [January 1874], Letters, 2:518.
“A Wind that woke a lone Delight”: Fr 1216D.
“Though inaudible”: ED to TWH, [spring 1876], Letters, 2:553.
“Your thought is so serious”: ED to TWH, [spring 1876], Letters, 2:552.
“That it is true”: ED to TWH, [January 1876], Letters, 2:546.
“Candor—my Preceptor—is the only wile”: ED to TWH, [February 1876], Letters, 2:548. She alludes to his paragraph in the prelude to Malbone: “One learns, in growing older, that no fiction can be so strange nor appear so improbable as would the simple truth; and that doubtless even Shakespeare did but timidly transcribe a few of the deeds and passions he had personally known. For no man of middle age can dare trust himself to portray life in its full intensity, as he has studied or shared it; he must resolutely set aside as indescribable the things most worth describing, and must expect to be charged with exaggeration, even when he tells the rest.”
“I almost inferred from your accent”: ED to TWH, [August 1876], Letters, 2:559.
“Surely, in the shelter of such double anonymousness”: HHJ to ED, [summer 1876], Letters, 2:563.
“I felt [li]ke a [gr]eat ox” “Let somebody somewhere”: HHJ to ED, [fall 1876], Letters, 2:565.
“I told her I was unwilling”: ED to TWH, [October 1876], Letters, 2:563.
“Often, when troubled by entreaty”: ED to TWH, [early 1877], Letters, 2:573.
Misunderstanding her request: Critics once read Mercy Philbrick’s Choice as based on Helen Hunt’s and Higginson’s unplighted friendship; other critics find Emily Dickinson in the figure of Mercy Philbrick, a woman devoted to her art. But this latter reading is strained. However, the male protagonist, Stephen White, bears some resemblance to Higginson in that he is preternaturally devoted to an ill, cranky mother who resembles Mary. And doubtless the novel contains Helen Hunt’s evaluation of the Higginson marriage: “This tyrannical woman held him chained. His submission to her would have seemed abject, if it had not been based on a sentiment and grounded in a loyalty which compelled respect” (p. 71).
“My dear friend”: TWH to ED, [fall 1876], Letters, 2:564.
“I thought your approbation”: ED to TWH, [January 1877], Letters, 2:572.
Friends of Vinnie’s: See YH, 2:253.
It occupies a “special place”: HHJ to ED, October 25, 1878, Letters, 2:626.
“Though we know”: ED to TWH, [June 1877], Letters, 2:583.
“Lay this Laurel on the One”: Fr 1428C.
“I have no other Playmate”: ED to TWH, [August 1877], Letters, 2:588; “It sounded as if the streets were running”: Fr 1454C; “She laid her docile Crescent down”: Fr 1453C; “I have no Life but this—”: Fr 1432C; “After all Birds have been investigated and laid aside”: Fr 1383.
“the loving you” and “the love of you”: See Fr, 3:1251–1253.
“The Wilderness is new—”: ED to TWH, [September 1877], Letters, 2:590.
CHAPTER TWELVE: MOMENTS OF PREFACE
“Your Face is more joyful”: ED to TWH, [October 1876], Letters, 2:566.
“How little there seems left to be done”: TWH, journal, September 2, 1877, Houghton.
“With sorrow”: ED to TWH, [September 1877], BPL.
“Perhaps she does not go so far”: Fr 1455C; “If I could help you?”: ED to TWH, [September 1877], Letters, 2:590.
“Danger is not at first”: ED to TWH, [autumn 1877], Letters, 2:594.
“To be human”: ED to TWH, [September 1877], Letters, 2:592.
At least one Dickinson biographer: See Taggard, The Life and Mind of Emily Dickinson, p. 318.
“I remember nothing so strong”: ED to TWH, [September 1877], Letters, 2:592.
“Dear Mr Bowles found out too late”: ED to Elizabeth Holland, [early 1878], Letters, 2:604.
“I felt it shelter to speak with you”: ED to TWH, January 19, 1878, Letters, 2:599.
“When you have lost a friend”: ED to TWH, [early June 1878], Letters, 2:611.
A military Rip Van Winkle: See TWH to AH, February 28, 1878, Houghton.
“inalienable muttonchop whiskers”: Wilson, Patriotic Gore, p. 488.
“I began to feel fearfully bewildered”: TWH to AH, February 22, 1878, Houghton.
“An individual seems so insignificant”: TWH, journal, February 21–25, 1878, Houghton.
“The same sky was above her” “I hold it utterly ungenerous”: See TWH, “Some War Scenes Revisited.”
Incensed, Higginson had denounced the…massacre: TWH, “Border Ruffianism in South Carolina,” p. 1.
“The Hope of seeing you was so sweet and serious—”: ED to TWH, [March 1878], Letters, 2:607.
“Is this the Hope that opens and shuts”: ED to TWH, [June 1878], Letters, 2:611.
“How brittle are the Piers”: Fr 1459.
“I have felt like a troubled Top”: ED to Elizabeth Holland, [December 1877], Letters, 2:596.
Darwin looked older: See TWH, “Carlyle’s Laugh,” p. 465; for his travels, see also TWH, “The Road to England” and “Literary Paris Twenty Years Ago.” 219 “There is no one so happy”: ED to TWH, [December 1878], Letters, 2:627.
“known little of Literature”: ED to TWH, [February 1879], Letters, 2:635.
she responded with typical humor: ED to TWH, [December 1879], Letters, 2:649.
“Must I lose the Friend”: ED to TWH, [1879], Letters, 2:649.
Such coincident occasions: Though we don’t know when Dickinson began her romance with Judge Lord, I suspect that, had she been in love with him at the time of Higginson’s marriage, she would have mailed him a poem slightly less reserved than the one she did send, reiterating themes haunting her work since her father’s death (I have copied the poem with the breaks that appeared in the letter to Higginson, BPL (1093):
We knew not that
We were to live
Nor when—we are
to die—
Our ignorance our
Cuirass is—
We wear Mortality
As lightly as an
Option Gown
till asked to take it
off.
By his intrusion, God
is known—
It is the same
with Life—
“Judge Lord never seemed to coalesce”: SGD, “Annals of the Evergreens,” typed ms., n.d., Houghton.
“strong in his intellect”: “Otis Phillips Lord,” in Hurd, History of Essex County, Massachusetts, p. xliv.
“Calvary and May”: ED to Benj
amin Kimball, [1885], Letters, 3:861.
And he and she exchanged vows: Lord’s letters to Dickinson were burned by the vigilant Vinnie, so we cannot be sure when the romance began. Biographers like Richard Sewall and Cynthia Wolff, following MTB, who first published evidence of the relationship, posit 1878 as the date of the earliest of these passionate fragments, but more recently—and more persuasively—Alfred Habegger has suggested that the romance began at a later time, particularly since Elizabeth Lord died only the year before. Similarly, I tend to think that the romance did not begin to flower until early 1880, though this, too, is a guess.
“the trespass of my rustic Love”: ED to Otis Lord, [April 1882], Werner A 742e. I have followed the corrective numbering-chronology offered in Marta Werner’s diligent Emily Dickinson’s Open Folios. Those interested in Dickinson’s letters to Lord should begin with this volume despite its occasional mistakes in transcription; it does offer a more convincing array of letters and suggests a better chronology than that offered by Johnson.
“Yet Tenderness has not a Date”: ED to Otis Lord, [April 30, 1882?], Werner A 742f.
“Judge Lord was with us”: ED to TWH, [October 1876], Letters, 2:566.
“Sweetest Name”: ED to Otis Lord, n.d., Werner A 748b.
“You said with loved timidity”: ED to Otis Lord, [December 3, 1882], Werner 749d.
“That was a big—sweet Story—”: ED to Otis Lord, [April 30, 1882?], Werner A 742.
“My lovely Salem smiles at me” “I confess that I love him—”: ED to Otis Lord, n.d., Werner A 734, 735.
In another draft of a letter: ED to Otis Lord, n.d., Werner A 736.
“To lie so near your longing—”: ED to Otis Lord, [1878–1879], Werner A 740.
“Dont you know you are happiest”: ED to Otis Lord, n.d., Werner A 739.
“Tuesday is a deeply depressed Day”: ED to Otis Lord, n.d., Werner A 757, 757a.
“Were Departure Separation”: [ED to Otis Lord?]; see Revelation, p. 94, and Werner, p. 275n: the original manuscript is missing.
In the summer of 1878: See “‘Saxe Holm’ Evolved,” the Springfield Republican, July 25, 1878, pp. 3–4.
“We can only say that we happen to know”: Springfield Republican, August 3, 1878, p. 3.
“an old-fashioned girl” “exquisitely refined & dainty in all her ways”: TWH to Ellen Conway, November 4, 1878, Butler.
his “only safety” “I’m adrift in the universe without it”: TWH to Ellen Conway, December 6, 1878, Butler.
“clear good-sense and…modest faithfulness”: TWH, “Seaside and Prairie,” p. 3.
“I shall pick ‘May flowers’ more furtively”: ED to TWH, [spring 1880], Letters, 3:661. Interestingly, he waited over a year before he shared the compliments with Dickinson, or she waited to answer him.
“I shall no doubt”: TWH to Ellen Conway, October 20, 1879, Butler.
“The Face in Evanescence lain”: Fr 1521.
“Most of our Moments”: ED to TWH, [spring 1880], Letters, 3:660.
“dazzling Baby”: ED to TWH, [August 1880], Letters, 3:668.
“I know but little of Little Ones”: ED to TWH, [summer 1881], Letters, 3:711.
“‘Go traveling with us’!”: Fr 1561.
“It is such inexpressible happiness”: TWH to AH, December 22, 1880, Houghton.
“The responsibility of Pathos”: ED to Elizabeth Holland, [fall 1880], Letters, 3:675.
“very improper”: ED to Elizabeth Holland, July 1889, Letters, 3:667.
“I have promised three Hymns”: ED to TWH, [November 1880], Letters, 3:680.
“The thoughtfulness I may not accept”: ED to TWH, [November 1880], Letters, 3:681.
“A Route of Evanescence”: Fr 1489E.
“My Country’s Wardrobe”: “My country need not change her gown,” Fr 1540; “The Savior must have been”: Fr 1538.
“Mine Enemy is growing old—”: Fr 1539B.
Cotton Mather would have burned her as a witch: Allen Tate, “Emily Dickinson,” in Sewall, Emily Dickinson, p. 27.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN: THINGS THAT NEVER CAN COME BACK
Hearing him scream: See MLT, journal, October 18, 1891, Yale.
“‘Aunt Emily, speaking of someone’”: Edward (Ned) Dickinson, quoted in MDB, Emily Dickinson Face to Face, p. 169.
“had gone back and become a young brother again”: MDB, Emily Dickinson Face to Face, p. 171.
It was a privilege: See MDB, Emily Dickinson Face to Face, p. 45.
Adored by his family and fussed over: See “Death of a Promising Boy,” Amherst Record, October 17, 1883.
“He gathered Hearts”: ED to SGD, [October 1884], Letters, 3:842.
“Your Urchin”: ED to SGD, [1880], Letters, 3:673.
A yellow wide-brimmed planter’s hat: See Claude M. Fuess, Amherst: The Story of a New England College (Boston: Little, Brown, 1935), p. 135, and Vryling Buffum to MTB, Yale.
Foraging through picture galleries: See YH, 2:41.
like “meeting God face to face”: SGD, “Annals of the Evergreens,” typed ms., n.d., Houghton.
“socially ambitious”—“perhaps a little too aggressive”: Burgess, Reminiscences of an American Scholar, p. 60.
“Sue saw no one as a child”: MLT, “Short Character Sketches,” [1882], Yale.
“rare hours, full of merriment”: Catherine Anthon to MDB, October 8, 1914, Houghton.
“a really brilliant and highly cultivated woman”: Burgess, Reminiscences of an American Scholar, p. 60.
“The tie between us”: ED to SGD, [late 1885], Letters, 3:893.
“Dear Sue—”: ED to SGD, [c. 1882], Letters, 3:733.
“One Sister have I in our house—”: Fr 5A.
“But Susan is a stranger yet—”: Fr 1433C (variant of “What mystery pervades a well!”).
“I feel the red in my mind”: ED to Elizabeth Holland, Letters, 2:452.
“The Things that never can come back, are several—”: Fr 1564; also in ED to Elizabeth Holland, [fall 1881], Letters, 3:714, and chapter 3.
“I think everyone will exclaim over it”: MLT, journal, [summer 1879], quoted in Austin and Mabel, p. 52.
“My little one will, I feel, be always secondary”: MLT, journal, October 6, 1879, MLT Papers, Yale.
Having been “taken in”: See MLT reminiscence, MTB Papers, Yale.
who “stimulates me intellectually more than any other woman”: MLT to WAD, [February 17, 1883], Yale.
“She thinks it is such a fine thing” “I could twist him around my little finger”: MLT, journal, March 2, 1882, Yale.
“their little affair”: MLT, journal, September 15, 1882, Yale.
“dear” Mr. Austin Dickinson “is so very fond of me” “to think that out of all the splendid & noble women”: MLT, journal, September 15, 1882, Yale.
“It nearly broke my heart”: WAD to MLT, [fall 1882], Yale; “I love you,
I admire you”: WAD to MLT, [1882], Yale; “The sun cannot shine without”: WAD to MLT, [1882], Yale. All quoted in Austin and Mabel, pp. 135, 138, 145.
“The way in which you love me”: MLT to WAD, [November 29, 1883], Yale.
“The greatest proof I have ever had”: MLT, journal, August 3, 1883, Yale.
“Ned has been very devoted”: MLT, journal, December 6, 1882, Yale.
“Where is the wrong in preferring sunshine to shadow!”: WAD to MLT, [November 1882?], Yale.
It would take another year: The best analysis of the affair can be found in Gay, The Bourgeois Experience, pp. 71–108; for a full account of the affair, see Austin and Mabel. 240 “Emily always respected real emotion”: MTB, diary, March 27, 1851, Yale.
“If anything happens to me”: WAD, quoted in Austin and Mabel, p. 139.
“She has not been outside”: MLT to Mary and Eben Loomis, November 6, 1881, Yale.
some of Emily’s strange, powerful poems: See MLT, diary, February 8, 1882, Yale.
“All the literary men are after her”: MLT, diary, March 26,
1882, Yale.
“‘You will not allow your husband to go there’”: Revelation, p. 59.
Before Austin would cross another Rubicon: WAD, diary, September 11, 1882, box 101, Yale.
“It was odd to think”: MLT, journal, September 16, 1882, Yale.
“A Route of Evanescence”: Fr 1489F.
“That without suspecting it”: ED to MLT, [September 1882], Letters, 3:740. Dickinson had also sent this poem, which she clearly liked, to Helen Hunt Jackson, her Norcross cousins, and Sarah Tuckerman before sending it to Higginson for his approval in 1880 and then consenting to offer it for auction at a charity benefit.
“I have just had a most lovely note”: MLT, journal, October 6, 1882, Yale.
“The great mission of pain”: ED to Frances and Louise Norcross, [late November 1882], Letters, 3:750.
“We were never intimate”: ED to Elizabeth Holland, [December 1882], Letters, 3:754.
A cousin recalled: Clara Newman Turner, “My Personal Acquaintance with Emily Dickinson,” quoted in YH, 2:383.
“My Brother is with us so often”: ED to James D. Clark, [mid-March 1883], Letters, 3:765.
“Blow has followed blow”: ED to Elizabeth Holland, [mid-December 1882], Letters, 3:754.
the “coals of fire”: TWH to Moncure Conway, June 9, 1882, Butler.
“a intimacy of many years”: ED to James D. Clark, [August 1882], Letters, 3:737.
“He rang one summer evening”: ED to James C. Clark, [August 1882], Letters, 3:738.
“Your Sorrow was in Winter—”: ED to Otis Lord, [December 3, 1882], Werner A 749c.
“Further in Summer than the Birds”: Fr 895D.
“‘Open the Door’”: ED to Elizabeth Holland, [1883], Letters, 3:803.
“Emily was devoted”: LD to unknown recipients, November 16, [1883], UVA.
“I see him in the Star”: ED to SGD, [October 1883], Letters, 3:799.
“Gilbert was his idol”: MLT, journal, November 11, 1883, Yale.
“I kept him alive”: MLT, journal, March 30, 1884, Yale.
“He, the youthful serious young scientist”: MTB, drafts, February 27–August 30, 1927, Yale.
“I do not think David is”: MLT, journal, February 6, 1890, Yale.
“beyond anything I have known”: WAD to MLT, July 6, 1885, Yale.
Adultery, he told his daughter: See MTB, notes on an interview with her father, David Peck Todd, September 29–October 3, 1933, Yale.
White Heat Page 40