# The Life and Letters of Emily Dickinson/Chapter 7

CHAPTER VII
LATER YEARS WITH BOOKS AND FRIENDS
From the time Emily was thirty her life can only be told by the development of herself. Any mere chronicle of events would leave out all that made her and her surviving poems.
Yet if there were few startling happenings to record, to her there was nothing otherwise. If art is as Mérimée once declared "exaggeration apropos"—she was an incomparable artist at life. To her there was a prodigality of excess in each thrill of the returning common day. Her spirit found its own nectars in spite of her loneliness for all her brother's home so vividly illustrated—in spite of the dearth of music, painting, and the stimulus others took for granted as necessary for any lasting accomplishment.
A brilliant and ardent admirer of her work said recently: "The truest vision I ever got of the great Napoleon was in hearing a great artist sing the 'Two Grenadiers.' That is the only way possible of expressing Emily Dickinson—by indirections, through her own milieu, her contacts with others, and the impressions she set down in her writings." There is hardly a soul left now who knew her or ever saw her, and only one of her own family surviving to depict her as not only a poet and mystic, but a beloved person, moving from window to window to watch the day's retreat or the change of light on Pelham hills, or flitting across from house to house, a dear familiar spirit of delight in either.
​As early as 1862 she had visibly withdrawn from the outside world, even humoring her moods until those she professed to love saw her less often when they came to the house. As one has said of the shortening afternoons of early autumn, "There was less of the Toreador spirit in her now"; though she was always the ecstatic, daredevil, shy paradox, supreme and incomparable, to those who found her. Once she seems puzzled by some slight coldness on the part of a friend—exclaiming, "Odd that I who run from so many cannot brook that one turn from me!" Yet she confessed that her ideal caller—like ideal cat—was always just going out of sight!
Her books and friends went together in her later life; books first, perhaps. But it was her own work done in secret and often at midnight—"Death's and Truth's Unlocking Time"—that "kept the awe away" and led her on. She confessed it to herself and hardly another. Most of her earliest friends remained her closest friends to the end; as she expressed it, "I never sowed a seed in childhood unless it was perennial—that is why my garden lasts." Those girls of her earliest choosing, Abby Wood, Eliza Coleman, Abiah Strong, Martha Gilbert, Emily Fowler, and Helen Fisk—all married and gone away from her—she cherished and was true to as the years gave her also Kate Anthon, Maria Whitney, Mrs. Bowles, and others drawn to her through her brother's family.
She had her own peculiar exclusive rights in the family friends also, the Hollands of Springfield, the Lords of Salem, her father's friend Mrs. Eastman, who lived abroad and wrote to them on thin paper with the letterhead of magical foreign places, sealed with enormous seals, and ​made them incredible presents of coral and mosaics and those cameos so coveted by that generation, when she made her rare visits upon them. The Hollands were intimates of the entire family, and until the death of Dr. Holland in 1881 the families visited back and forth familiarly, Emily going to them after she had ceased to accept invitations even from her own cousins in Boston. Dr. Josiah Gilbert Holland was one of the founders of "Scribner's Magazine" in 1870 and became one of its editors; leaving Springfield, where he had been engaged on the "Republican" for many years, to live in New York. At his home, "Bonnicastle," named from the hero of his first novel, his friends were constantly entertained and a sorry gap in the lives of the entire Dickinson family was made by the change. Dr. Holland—who afterward came to be widely known as J. G. Holland—made a valuable contribution to local American history in his two-volume "History of Western Massachusetts." He also wrote a number of novels, "Arthur Bonnicastle," "The Bay Path"—a colonial tale, one of his first—followed by the "Titcomb Letters," "Nicholas Minturn," "Sevenoaks," etc., and several volumes of poems, of which "Bitter-sweet," "Kathrina," and "The Mistress of the Manse" were those most popular. After his work called him to New York to live, he often returned to the Dickinson home for rest and refreshment and inspiration. Richard Watson Gilder, later editor of the "Century Magazine," remembered being taken there by him, as a lad, but "did not see Miss Emily," a fact he bewailed in later years.
JUDGE LORD
There was a certain kind of wit she labelled "the Judge Lord brand." One specimen of it especially relished by both remains still pinned to her tiny workbox. It is yellow with age, in a type quite bygone and evidently cut from the county paper. It is marked in her own handwriting—"Returned by Judge Lord with approval!"
​NOTICE!
My wife Sophia Pickles having left my bed and board without just cause or provocation, I shall not be responsible for bills of her contracting.
Solomon Pickles
NOTICE!
I take this means of saying that Solomon Pickles has had no bed or board for me to leave for the last two months.
Sophia Pickles
Another story which they repeated, liking its portentous inference lacking fact, was this; the Nurse speaks first.
"Doctor," says I, kind of low and deferential-like, "I am of your opinion."
"And what was his opinion?" asked the listener.
Her brother's children never forgot the Sunday when he repeated at the dinner table a few of the hymns of his upbringing, their teeth chattering at his rendition of
"My thoughts on awful subjects roll— Damnation and the Dead!"
Emily had about this time quite a spicy affair with a young law student in her father's office, an habitué of the house who was bewitched with her and certainly added quite an amount of variety, if only as another objective for her own mental sallies. He became a confirmed bachelor, but she assailed him with a valentine unique in that Saint's calendar, and he brought her many books, among which were the first copies of the Brontë girls' strange stories, from "Jane Eyre" to "Wuthering Heights" and the "Tenant of Wildfell Hall."
​The Civil War, for which Amherst furnished a proud quota, must have crashed in on the seclusion of Emily's thought, thrilling her as drum and fife—but the personal realization of it did not come to her until Fraser Stearns, son of President Stearns, was killed at the battle of Newbern in 1862.
This was her first intimate reaction to the universal tragedy, and she wrote poignantly of it to more than one friend; also of trying to do all in her power to comfort his family—especially the young sister, Ella (afterward Mrs. James Lee, of Boston), of whom she was always devotedly fond.
It was in 1862 also that her literary philandering with Colonel Thomas Wentworth Higginson began through a stray note of admiration from her for his article in the "Atlantic Monthly" on the "Procession of the Flowers," sent her by Sister Sue. Her family viewed the ensuing correspondence between them as a diverting interlude rather than a serious instruction, for, though she addressed him as "Dear Master" with an outward show of docile humility, she never changed one line to please him. He heard from her in camp during the Civil War, which he entered in a volunteer regiment in 1863, and it was in the September of that same year that her eyes necessitated her going to Boston for serious treatment, which abbreviated her correspondence almost to entire elimination for some time.
From the close of the war until 1868 their relations seem to have remained as a comedy version of Browning's "Statue and the Bust." Their letters were all they knew of each other. For one reason or another he was prevented from visiting Amherst and she was disinclined to ​leave home, even to visit her relatives in Boston. His letters to her, and there were many of them, she labelled to be burned upon her death; her chivalry outrunning his publication of her little impulsive notes to him, published with his own comment. One of his somehow did escape into Sister Sue's papers, and in this, dated May, 1868, he says eagerly:
Ever your friend—
To which she replied in a letter full of gratitude and grace, but as Shakespeare's Imogen might have spoken, "I do not cross my father's ground to any house or town." In August of the same year 1870 he went to see her at Amherst instead. After this until her death their friendship and correspondence continued uninterrupted.
Her cousins Louisa and Fannie Norcross, relatives on her mother's side, were her beloved always. The winters they spent at the Hotel Berkeley in Boston, when she was with them at brief intervals, she never ceased to look back upon lovingly, even wistfully—and they, too, were of her elect from whom she never ran away. Her Southern cousin, Perez Cowan, a Carolinian, was another of her favored relatives, for whom she had a real affection. His softer accent, genial manner relieved of the New England stiffness, loosened her shy tongue and appealed to her eager imagination. His coming was always "a tropic," though she could never be prevailed upon for a return visit upon any of the family "below the frost line."
Her correspondence with Mr. C. H. Clarke, whom she ​met but once, continued until just before death, another evidence of the inclusive quality of her human sympathy.
Emily's childhood intimacy with Helen Hunt Jackson, later the author of "Mercy Philbrick's Choice," "Ramona," etc., was one of her dearest pleasures. "H. H.," as her books were signed, would be driven into town with a pair of smashing grey horses, which were dramatically walked up and down before the house, while the two charmers visited together behind the closed blinds. From girlhood Helen looked up to Emily as something supernatural, and Emily returned her adoration, calling Helen a witch, but never succumbing to her repeated requests for material for publication. Helen Hunt was herself a siren who enchanted all men's hearts—a hopeless coquette from her youth up, worldly where Emily was secluded, expressive while Emily was reserved, a charmer of charmers, who never let go her hold on the hand of the little girl she played with under the syringas, and never lost a chance to come back and warm herself at the fire of that deathless altar.
What they talked of none can ever know, for the door was shut upon their hours together, and not one member of the family ever dared invade. Their partings overheard were like those of desperate final sundered souls; but both were dramatic of temperament and to Emily the darkness was denser always after the radiant passage of one of her chosen. Helen always preferred Emily in genius and power, and considered herself but a small spark beside her. Her generosity of appreciation was boundless and well grounded. Her letters from Emily, as well as hers to Emily, were believed to have been burned at last in accordance with their own agreement.
​"Mercy Philbrick's Choice" in the No Name Series was attributed to Emily, but denied in a single white glance of repudiation from Emily that such could be thought possible. One poem "H. H." did publish at her own risk, but Emily never knew it until the book appeared called "A Masque of Poets." She could not even dimly understand Helen's merry protestation that it was fun to make people wonder and keep them guessing. She did not want them even to suspect about her—guessing was the last of her inclinations toward herself. Mr. Sweetser's looking at her in the old church was all she wanted of publicity, bless her! That was almost more even than she could endure.
Helen out in the world, courted, quoted, envied, a beauty always, full of social ease and grace, brought the world, like an attar of fantastic blend, to her little whiterobed hostess, who gave in return her heart's devotion and a deeper glance at life and trust than any Society could ever teach or bestow. "When you are dead you will be sorry you were so selfish!" Helen threw back at her gaily, when she had again refused to meet some other friend proposed. It was through Helen Hunt that her friendship with Mr. Thomas Niles began, after her poem "Success" was pirated, and though she wrote to him and sent him a poem now and then he could never induce her to publish. Emily had spirit relations with her living, actual neighbors, much such as are now broadcasted through the air, sending her notes on special occasions, or with flowers or some of her exquisite cookery in return for their little attentions to her hidden presence. It is impossible to cite them all; the Jenkinses, the Mathers, the Bliss family, returned from Syria for the education ​of the sons, were those nearest. Most of them she seldom saw; they hardly expected her to see them. Royalty was never more intact, though her methods were so simple, her spirit guileless of it as guile. Mrs. John Anthon, with just a touch of Irish blood in her veins, was a gay madcap of a girl, solemnized by cruel sorrow later in life, but always witty and of blessed sympathy and humor. From their first meeting, when as Kate Scott she was living in the old Fenimore Cooper mansion at Cooperstown, Emily's heart "voted for her." Living abroad as she did, she brought the very breath of life during her rare visits, and was one of the dwindling few Emily never refused to see, going over to her brother's home when she was there, long after her earlier stages of seclusion.
MARIA WHITNEY
Grey-eyed, pale, keen, crisp of tongue from the habit of clean thought and the study of languages other than her own, their apparent contrast mated unerringly, and they never missed a chance to match discoveries or compare revelations. In those days a free-thinker, a materialist, was almost a felon. For a woman to profess such scepticism was daring beyond credibility. The sincerity of the troubled inability "to believe" was undoubted in this case, and it must have set Emily off on boundless conjecture, encountered at such close and resolute range.
But after all her faithful devotion to her friends of girlhood is cited, those she professed profligate-hearted from start to finish of her solitary life, there was but one to whom she entrusted the secret of her self. Many instances are in existence still of her referring to her sister-in-law's judgment in all literary matters. The poem called "A Syllable" in the published collection was originally written with a second verse:
Could any mortal lip divine The elemental freight Of undeveloped syllable 'Twould crumble with the weight, The prey of unknown zones, The pillage of the sea, These tabernacles of the mind That told the news to me.
The poem which published reads "A modest lot, a fame petite," originally had a first verse sent with it:
A little bread, a crust, a crumb, A little trust, a demijohn,
Can keep the soul alive— Not portly, mind! But breathing, warm, Conscious, as old Napoleon The night before the crown!
The resemblance of these first four lines to the now popular quatrain of Omar Khayyám is noteworthy, as Emily so far as can be proved never saw the translations of Fitzgerald, though they were published in England in 1858. Her Sister Sue never saw them until the Houghton Mifflin & Company American edition in 1888, two years after Emily's death; nor were they among her books.
She was always eager to respond to Susan's criticism, and when the first pencilled copy was sent over of the poem, "Safe in their alabaster chambers," it was returned with profound admiration, but this comment, "The second verse is not frosty enough yet." To which Emily replied next day:
Perhaps this would suit you better, Sue?
Grand go the years in the crescent above them, Worlds scoop their arcs And firmaments bow, Diadems drop and Doges surrender Soundless as dots on a disc of snow.
Is this frostier?
Springs shake their sills But the echoes stiffen, Hoar is the window and numb the door, Tribes of Eclipse in tents of marble Staples of Ages have buckled there.
The first variant was chosen, and so appears as a third stanza, in Volume One of the published poems. "In this Wondrous Sea" was sent to Susan in 1848 when she was ​but eighteen, signed "Emilie": after the whim of her girlhood.
The poem entitled "The Master," as written "To Sue," reads, "He fumbles at your soul," line first; in line first of the second stanza, "Prepares your brittle nature"; adding two lines at the end:
When winds take forests in their paws, The Universe is still.
The critical estimate of Emily's thought and her ultimate place in American literature must be left to one more wise, better qualified, and less near her actual bewildering personality. It may be pardonable to hint at her sagacity of words, in a few instances, since George Meredith says, "We are in truth indebted for expression to those who phrase us." She sorted and tested them as a wine-taster in his cellar. They came, for the most part, but often another came too; they came tandem and in pairs, shouting at her to be chosen. The joy of mere words was to her like red and yellow balls to the juggler. The animate web for the inanimate thing, the ludicrous adjective that turned a sentence mountebank in an instant, the stringing of her meaning like a taut bow with just the economy of verbiage possible, the unusual phrase redeemed from usage by her single selected specimen of her vocabulary—all this was part of her zestful preoccupation. For example:
It was like a breath from Gibraltar to hear your voice again, Sue. Your impregnable syllables need no prop to stand.
I dreamed of you last night and send a carnation to endorse it.
Your little mental gallantries are sweet as chivalry—which is to me a shining word, though I don't know what it means.
​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.
Emily
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 ​art and literature of his period, and was glad a friend heard Rubinstein for her, adding "he makes me think of polar nights." She mentioned her sister as "Vinnie, spectacular as Disraeli and sincere as Gladstone," and alludes to "a new pussy the colour of Bramwell Brontë's hair." One gets her feeling for Wordsworth by one of these oblique slants when she remembers her cousin's sitting-room at the Berkeley "as the poet's thought of Windymere."
"David Copperfield" was published when she was twenty-one, and Dickens was always a favorite of her father's, so that many of the expressions used in his stories became household words. "Donkeys, Davy," was flung back over Emily's shoulder as she fled from unwelcome visitors. The drollery of Dickens was congenial to her sense of the ludicrous, and "Barkis is willin'" was a message carried more than once by the children between her and their mother without any realization of its import.
She was keenly interested in the Egyptian campaign of Arabi Pasha against the allied French and English, alluding to his defeat at Tel-el-Kebir, after the bombardment of Alexandria, with a grasp of European affairs and interest in their great statesmen unique among the women of her day, who chiefly overheard their newspaper information at scattered male dictation. "Will you have Theophilus or Junius?" she offers Mr. Bowles for a birthday gift. He called her his Rascal—with a gleam in his eyes in speaking of her like that of freshets breaking loose. "Part angel, part demon," he said once, when she refused to see him after he had driven over from Springfield for that peculiar pleasure. It was his custom to bring ​to her the manuscripts of famous writers, before publication, and when he entertained Canon Kingsley, Bret Harte, Charles Dickens, or any other author of note, he would share his impressions of them first-hand with her; often reading her notes to him to those he considered able to follow her meteoric flights. She counted him among her brightest beacons, and when his Life and Letters was about to be published in 1885 wrote—
Dear Sue:
It seems like a memoir of the sun when the Noon is gone! You remember his swift way of wringing and flinging away a theme, and others picking it up and gazing bewildered after him; and the prance that crossed his eyes at such times was unrepeatable.
Emily was a fond reader of Ik Marvel. On receiving a copy of "Dream Life" from her brother she wrote back:
It is not nearly so great a book as "Reveries of a Bachelor," yet I think it full of the very sweetest fancies, and more exquisite language I defy any man to use. On the whole I enjoyed it very much, but I can't help wishing that he had been translated like Enoch of old, after his bachelor reverie, and chariot of fire and the horsemen thereof were all that had been seen of him ever after.
In the winter of 1857, Emerson was her brother's guest. There is no mention of their having met—inexplicable as it seems—but in a note to her Sister Sue after his departure she says, "It must have been as if he had come from where dreams are born!"
She wrote to Sister Sue as if it were perfectly probable:
Dreamed of your meeting Tennyson at Ticknor and Fields last night. Where the treasure is the heart is also.
When Howells first appeared in the magazine of which Dr. Holland was editor, Emily wrote:
Emily
His reply came back:
Holland
Her books and authors were a vital part of her happiness. On the walls of her own room hung framed portraits of Mrs. Browning, George Eliot, and Carlyle. If only Emily could have heard the question an old family retainer, assisting at the time of Emily's death, asked diffidently, after some hesitation, if they were "relatives on the Norcross side"; adding hastily, "I know they can't be Dickinsons, for I have seen all of them and they are all good-looking."
In writing her letters to friends at a distance, she seems to show an accumulated sadness which in her intercourse with those about her she rarely if ever permitted expression. No one of her family in either house ever associated her with sadness or any tendency toward indulgence of heaviness of spirit, though solemnity was her normal attitude toward life and like those golden Florentines "she was eternally preoccupied with death."
From the death of Samuel Bowles in 1878 life lost its original sense of certainty. And when her father died in Boston during the June of 1879, the very foundations trembled under her. He was stricken in the House of the Legislature, where he had gone to serve the local interests of his town, and died without recovering consciousness, at the Tremont House, before any of his family could reach him. Her brother Austin had to break the news to ​the three worshipping women of the end of that ideal unbroken family life, and it was for the effect upon Emily that the task was especially dreaded.
She describes it afterward in a line:
We were eating our supper when Austin came in.... He had a despatch in his hand, and I saw by his face that we were all lost, though I did not know how.
For a time it seemed as if her mind could not sustain the blow. His death seemed to reverse all laws of nature or mind for Emily. No one who heard her repeated cry, "Where is he? I can't find him!" could ever forget it, or those days of abyss when her face wore a stricken expression of surprise that the world and stars could slip from their orbits and leave such confusion.
She never quite recovered her faith in life, and just a year later her mother was paralyzed. All through the long, tedious invalidism following, Emily ministered to her with a tenderness as to one also bound for the supernatural and to be cherished as a temporary guest of the heart, already half an angel. Two such calamities shook her belief in stability of this world of hers, where she had been the child of parents permanent and equal to all her natural demand of care and continuance. "The beginning of always is more dreadful than the close—for that is sustained by flickering identity," she wrote her Sister Sue.
Dr. Holland's death in 1881 was another link broken, followed by the loss of Judge Lord, who was now both father and friend.
In the autumn of 1883 her youngest nephew, Gilbert, died after an illness of only three days and shattered the goldenest intimacy she had left. He was a precocious and ​brilliant child. Emily idolized him from his birth and only after days of stricken silence recovered from the blow sufficiently to write his mother:
Dear Sue—
The vision of immortal life has been fulfilled. How simply at last the fathom comes! The passenger and not the sea surprises us. Gilbert rejoiced in secrets. His life was panting with them. With what a menace of light he cried, "Don't tell, Aunt Emily." My ascended playmate must instruct me now. Show us, prattling preceptor, but the way to thee! He knew no niggard moment. His life was full of boon. The playthings of the Dervish were not so wild as his. No crescent was this creature—he travelled from the full. Such soar, but never set. I see him in the star and meet his sweet velocity in everything that flies.
His life was like a bugle That winds itself away: His elegy an echo, His requiem ecstasy.
Dawn and meridian in one, wherefore should he wait, wronged only of night, which he left for us? Pass to thy rendezvous of light pangless except for us who slowly ford the mystery which thou hast leapt across!
And during these years of increasing isolation it was to her work she turned for relief and renewal. She admitted she was besieged for poems, but held her peace, working because "it kept the awe away," though in other mood she confessed it "a bleak redeeming."
From the time of her father's death she never left the house, except to flit about the porch at dusk to water her frail plants—set just outside in summer—looking in her white dress like just another moth fluttering in the twilights. The red army blanket that was thrown down on the dewy grass to prevent her taking cold was the only bit of color associated with her, and the origin of the ​many fanciful tales of a red carpet spread before her when she went beyond the door.
It is at this time she wrote:
There is no first or last in Forever. It is Centre there all the time. To believe is enough and the right of supposing.
She had never told her family of her writing and they never dared ask. She never showed what she wrote to them. Her timidity awed their love and New England reserve completed the deadlock. Once and only once her sister-in-law published a poem of hers incognita, and when she showed it to Emily, in the darkest, entirest privacy, was terrified for the result of her experiment—the little white moth being almost fluttered to death, all a-tremble and ready to die of the experience and be found on the floor next morning a mere hint of winged dust! She seemed to know the world from intuition, but to shrink from that which sends the soft bright-eyed things flying from us in the forest. All the while she was writing and selecting and tying up her poems in slender packages with a single thread, another Lady of Shalott at her subtler tapestries that were to amaze her readers when her little boat had drifted down to Camelot forever.
"There's substance here" might have been truly said of her mentality, even when the supernatural began to outweigh the actual in her consideration. This was no empty yearning after a lost romance, no idle acceptance of passivity. Up to the last, when blow after blow had stunned her, Emily kept her vital creative force intact. Watched over by her sister and what Mr. Henry James once called "an archaic Irish servant," she was with difficulty kept at home in the flesh those last years; seeing her brother's family at rarer intervals, and still sending ​her pencilled messages, among which are the few quoted at random:
Great hungers feed themselves but little hungers ail in vain.
Never mind, dear, trial as a stimulus far exceeds wine though it could hardly be prohibited as a beverage.
A promise is firmer than a hope. Hope never knew horizon. Awe is the first hand that is held to us. Hopelessness in its first film had not life to last. That would close the spirit, and no intercession could do that. Intimacy with mystery after great space will usurp its place. Moving on in the dark like loaded boats at night, though there is no course, there is boundlessness. Expanse cannot be lost.
Morning might come by accident, Sister, Night comes by event— To believe the final line of the card Would foreclose Faith, Faith is doubt, Sister. Show me Eternity, and I will show you memory— Both in one package lain And lifted back again. Be Sue while I am Emily, Be next what you have ever been— Infinity.