“Glee—”: “Glee—The great storm is over—,” Fr 685; “I never saw”: “I never saw a Moor,” Fr 800; “Soul, wilt thou”: See also “Soul, Wilt thou toss again?” Fr 89.
“I died”: “I died for Beauty—but was scarce,” Fr 448.
“Safe in their Alabaster Chambers—”: Fr 124.
“I am astounded”: TWH to MLT, November 12, 1890, Yale.
“No Brigadier throughout the Year”: Fr 1596; “A Route of Evanescence”: Fr 1489; “Dare you see a Soul at the ‘White Heat’?”: Fr 401; “The nearest Dream recedes—unrealized—”: Fr 304; “When I hoped I feared—”: Fr 594; “Before I got my eye put out—”: Fr 336B; “It sifts from Leaden Sieves”: Fr 291D; “A Bird, came down the Walk—”: Fr 359.
“Your riches taught me poverty”: In Fr 418B.
“This shows we must have another volume”: TWH to MLT, November 12, 1890, Yale.
“the only person who can feel as I do” “I feel…as if we had climbed”: TWH to MLT, December 15, 1890, Yale.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN: ME—COME! MY DAZZLED FACE
Fed for years: See Stedman, Poets of America, pp. 457–461; see also Stedman, An American Anthology, pp. xv–xxiv.
“A poet, most of all, should not believe in limitations”: Stedman, Poets of America, p. 461.
“bitch-goddess success”: See Richardson, William James, p. 306.
“at the head of all American fiction”: TWH to Edith Wharton, December 5, 1905, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, New Haven, Conn.
“Nobody reads Thoreau”: TWH, journal, December 23, 1866, Houghton; see also Malbone, pp. 99–100.
“irresistible needle-touch”: [TWH], Recent Poetry, Nation, November 27, 1890, p. 423.
if “nothing else had come out of our life”: [Howells], Editor’s Study, p. 320.
“I have hoped and hoped”: MLT, diary, December 31, 1890, Yale.
Apprised of some internecine warfare: See TWH to MLT, December 23, 1890, Yale.
And to her great satisfaction: It is not clear whether she kept the money or gave it to Lavinia, but it seems she kept it; she also kept one hundred dollars from book royalties, the same amount paid Higginson.
“I think there is in literary history”: TWH to Brander Matthews, March 24, 1891, Butler.
“the art of composition”: New World, p. 16; see Thoreau, “The Last Days of John Brown,” in A Yankee in Canada, p. 284.
“Let us alter as little as possible”: TWH to MLT, April 21, 1891, Yale.
“put so in order to have the rhyme perfect”: MLT to TWH, July 18, 1891, BPL.
“Whose are the little beds—I asked”: Fr 85.
when Todd wanted to replace: See MLT to TWH, July 13, 1891, BPL; “Dare you see a Soul at the ‘White Heat’?”: Fr 401.
“One poem only I dread a little to print”: TWH to MLT, April 21, 1891, Yale; “‘Wild Nights’”: “Wild nights—Wild nights!” Fr 269.
“Further in Summer than the Birds—”: Fr 895; “They dropped like Flakes—”: Fr 545.
“It was not Death, for I stood up”: Poems, Second Series; the poem is Fr 355.
“it might do well for you to suggest”: TWH to MLT, August 4, 1891, Yale.
“all interference not absolutely inevitable”: This and the subsequent quotation is from MLT, preface to Poems, Second Series.
“It would seem that at first I tried a little”: This and subsequent quotations are from TWH, “Emily Dickinson’s Letters.”
“Essential oils”: “Essential Oils—are wrung,” Fr 772; “Wild nights!”: “Wild nights—Wild nights!” Fr 269; “Going to him!”: “Going to Him! Happy letter!” Fr 277; “Their height”: “Their Hight in Heaven comforts not—,” Fr 725.
the more they balked: Quotations in AB, pp. 174–175.
“I honestly think his mind unbalanced”: Thomas Bailey Aldrich, quoted in Lubbers, Emily Dickinson, p. 202.
“I fail to detect in her work”: [Aldrich], “The Contributors’ Club,” p. 144.
“It is reassuring to hear the English”: Alice James, The Diary of Alice James, p. 227.
“I had expected to leave the letters entirely to you”: TWH to MLT, May 13, 1893, BPL.
“give the copyright of Emily’s mind to anyone”: LD, quoted in TWH to MLT, May 30, 1893, BPL.
it “will be the last, I suppose”: TWH to MLT, August 27, 1893, Yale.
“I wish as I always do”: TWH to MLT, September 27, 1895, Yale.
“mystic and bizarre Emily”: TWH to MLT, November 29, 1894, Yale.
“I think she can trust my honor”: LD, quoted in AB, p. 297.
“It is noticeable, also, that in a few of the poems”: [TWH], Recent Poetry, Nation, October 8, 1896, p. 275.
“Her vogue has passed”: Literary Notes, New York Tribune, [August 23, 1896], quoted in AB, p. 345.
“often like that of Emily Dickinson”: [TWH], Recent Poetry, Nation, December 11, 1902, p. 465.
“best for now”: WAD, quoted in Austin and Mabel, p. 297.
“moral quicksand”: Austin and Mabel, p. 412.
Evidently Mrs. Todd had forgotten: Later commentators see Sue maliciously guiding the suit from a discreet distance in order to take revenge on the woman who wrecked her home.
“I shall die standing up”: MLT, diary, December 31, 1898, Yale.
“blight of self-interest and self-glorification”: MTB, notes, February 27–August 30, 1927, Yale.
“Me—Come! My dazzled face”: Fr 389.
CHAPTER NINETEEN: BECAUSE I COULD NOT STOP
“American literature is not”: New World, p. 34.
“the mixture of nationalities is constantly coining”: TWH, “Letter to a Young Contributor,” p. 406.
“the art of composition is as simple”: Henry David Thoreau, quoted in New World, p. 16.
“Mr. James has no doubt placed himself”: New World, pp. 65–66.
“Let the picture only be well drawn”: Book and Heart, p. 43.
“in case I were going to prison”: “The Biography of Browning’s Fame,” Boston Browning Society Papers, 1886–1897, quoted in Hintz, “Thomas Wentworth Higginson,” p. 483.
“in attempting to enforce…[fixed] laws”: TWH, preface to TWH and Bigelow, American Sonnets, p. iii. He included sonnets by Poe, Edwin Markham, Henry Timrod, Jones Very, Whittier, and Ellery Channing as well as a large number of women sonneteers, including his wife, Minnie, Emma Lazarus, Maria Lowell, Harriet Monroe, Louise Brooks, and Edith Wharton.
the “American poet of passion is yet to come”: TWH, “Americanism in Literature,” p. 59.
“She is to be tested”: [TWH], Recent Poetry, Nation, October 8, 1896, p. 275.
“We take for granted”: “Leading Figures in American Literature,” Dial, November 1, 1903, p. 314.
“She died,—this was the way she died”: Fr 154.
“a strange, solitary, morbidly sensitive”: TWH and Boynton, A Reader’s History of American Literature, p. 131.
“stands at the opposite remove”: TWH and Boynton, A Reader’s History of American Literature, p. 131.
“an admiring Bog”: In “I’m Nobody! Who are you?” Fr 260.
“It would be easy to make up a long list of authors”: Book and Heart, p. 208.
“Perhaps the more we are destined”: Book and Heart, p. 210.
“Few of us now remain who were baptized”: TWH to Edna Dow Cheney, December 27, 1893, Smith.
“just as near slavery as possible”: TWH, “The Case of the Carpet Baggers,” Nation, March 2, 1899, pp. 162–163.
“To those who were living”: CY, p. 363.
“Freedom is freedom”: TWH, “Where Liberty Is Not, There Is My Country,” Harper’s Bazaar, August 12, 1899, p. 671.
“These people have a right to the freedom of civilization”: TWH, quoted in Strange Enthusiasm, p. 389.
“must cut adrift from every organization”: TWH, “Address to the Colored People of the United States,” September 26, 1900, Houghton. Ironica
lly, racism fueled the anti-imperialism of the Democratic candidates, who wished to steer clear of “brown” Filipinos.
“I have yours of Nov. 23rd”: TWH to William Jennings Bryan, copy marked “private,” November 27, 1901, Houghton.
“a freedom tempered by chain-gangs, lynching, and the lash”: TWH’s essay “Intensely Human,” originally published in the Atlantic Monthly in 1904, was collected in Part, p. 114.
“Was any white man ever lynched”: “Intensely Human,” in Part, p. 121.
“As the memories of the slave period fade away”: “Intensely Human,” in Part, p. 136.
“I am a man old enough to recall”: TWH, introduction to William Sinclair, The Aftermath of Slavery, p. xi.
“the fact of colorphobia”: TWH to Brander Matthews, September 14, 1906, Butler.
“it is important for this race to produce”: “Intensely Human,” in Part, p. 130.
“They saved you”: TWH, from “Now and Then,” Harvard Graduates Magazine, September 1904, p. 47.
“No white community will ever consent”: TWH, Boston Evening Transcript, June 1, 1909.
“Cheerful Yesterdays is indeed, in spite of its cheer”: Henry James, “American Letter,” p. 677.
“He is too much of a moralist”: Theodore Tilton, The Golden Age (1871), pasted into TWH’s Atlantic Essays scrapbook, Houghton.
“There are so many younger writers to be recognized & encouraged”: TWH to Edmund Clarence Stedman, August 6, 1905, Butler.
“The old trees must fall in order to give the younger growth a chance”: Book and Heart, p. 189.
“but for some inches of space”: TWH, p. 388.
“All teaches us”: TWH, “The Favorites of a Day,” Independent, November 19, 1896, p. 2.
“was prized as having gained a second place”: CY, p. 183.
“occupied intensely in practical affairs”: Santayana, The Genteel Tradition, pp. 39–40.
“sicklied o’er with T. W. Higginson”: Alice James, The Diary of Alice James, p. 227.
“There is not, to my mind”: Amy Lowell, quoted in Damon, Amy Lowell, p. 611.
“uncertain certainty”: In Fr 1421.
“unconscious and uncatalogued”: Quoted in Monroe, “The Single Hound,” p. 138.
“dug out of her native granite”: Quoted in Elizabeth Shepley Sergeant, “An Early Imagist,” New Republic, [August 14, 1915]; quoted in Blake and Wells, The Recognition of Emily Dickinson, p. 89.
“Once adjust oneself to the spinsterly angularity”: Conrad Aiken, introduction to Selected Poems of Emily Dickinson, quoted in Blake and Wells, The Recognition of Emily Dickinson, p. 117.
the “hero of a hundred Atlantic paragraphs”: Taggard, The Life and Mind of Emily Dickinson, p. 172.
the dull “Cambridge” group: See Macy, American Writers on American Literature, p. 178.
“‘Half-cracked’ to Higginson”: Adrienne Rich, “I Am in Danger—Sir—,” in Rich, Necessities of Life, p. 33.
“one should not demand more acumen”: Lubbers, Emily Dickinson, pp. 201–202.
“we must choose between the past forms”: TWH, Things New and Old, p. 5.
“It is remarkable”: Hawthorne, The Centenary Edition, 1:164.
“‘George Washington was the Father of his Country’,”: ED to Elizabeth Holland, [late autumn 1884], Letters, 3:849.
“very good for elder years”: TWH, p. 393.
“I wish we had automobiles when I was a boy”: TWH, quoted in “Colonel Higginson,” Hartford Courant, [May 11, 1911], p. 8.
“Best of all, is to lead”: TWH, “The Unforlorn Hope,” Independent, [April 14, 1892], p. 6.
“Joy! shipmate—joy!”: Whitman, Leaves of Grass, in Complete Poetry and Collected Prose, p. 608.
“that I am glad we live in a universe large enough”: TWH, “Immortality,” Radical, (May 1869), p. 385
“Because I could not stop for Death—”: Fr 479.
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