1 HER FAVORITE ADJECTIVE WAS “FUNNY”

1. “We thank thee, Father, for these strange minds that enamor us against thee.” HDT WHAT? INDEX

EMILY DICKINSON EMILY DICKINSON

Note that although it is not commonly spoken of, Emily Dickinson, like Abraham Lincoln, was exotropic — this technical term refers to an outward deviation of the eyes. Strabismus refers to any misalignment of the eyes, and exotropia is the type of strabismus which occurs when an eye turns outward rather than inward. It commonly begins around age 2 to 4 years but can begin at any age. Emily sought treatment for this condition in 1864 and 1865 from Doctor Henry Willard Williams in Boston. HDT WHAT? INDEX

EMILY DICKINSON EMILY DICKINSON

1813

The first brick residence in Amherst, Massachusetts was constructed at 280 Main Street, by a VIP name of Samuel Fowler Dickinson, a founder of Amherst College. It was to be known as The Mansion. After this structure had aged somewhat, it would house Dickinson’s grand-daughter Emily Dickinson. Since the house is still in use as a faculty residence, to get in to see Emily’s room and her white dress you will need to make prior arrangements by phoning (413)542-2321. HDT WHAT? INDEX

EMILY DICKINSON EMILY DICKINSON

1828

May 6, Tuesday: Jonathan Dymond died of consumption at the age of 31.

The marriage of Edward Dickinson and Emily Norcross. They would share the Widow Montague’s home in Amherst, Massachusetts and take in student boarders. HDT WHAT? INDEX

EMILY DICKINSON EMILY DICKINSON

1829

April 16, Thursday: In the ugly aftermath of the breakup with his 18-year-old bride, Sam Houston resigned as governor of Tennessee.

A 1st child, William Austin Dickinson, was born to Mr. Edward Dickinson and Mrs. Emily Norcross Dickinson. AUSTIN DICKINSON

According to an almanac of the period, “General Lamar embarks at Patia for Guayaquil with 1200 troops and 200 horses for the purpose of recommencing hostilities with the Peruvians.” CHRONOLOGY OF EVENTS HDT WHAT? INDEX

EMILY DICKINSON EMILY DICKINSON

1830

April 3, Saturday: Johann Nepomuk Hummel gave the 2d and last concert of his trip through Paris.

A convict ship, the Lady Feversham, set sail from England for New South Wales, Australia. Of the 180 convicts undergoing transportation, 72 had received life sentences and the average sentence was 8 years.

Mr. Edward Dickinson and Mrs. Emily Norcross Dickinson purchased half of the Samuel F. Dickinson homestead in Amherst, Massachusetts.

In Providence, Rhode Island, Friend Stephen Wanton Gould learned that Moses Lopez had died in New-York, and that his body had been carried to the Jewish cemetery in Newport for burial: 7th day 3 of 4 M / By the News Paper from Newport this evening I discoverd the removal by death of several of my old neighbours & friends - Among Whom were Wm S N Allen - James Dinfer[?] of Portsmouth - Capt Henry Hunter - & Also my old acquaintance Moses Lopez had died on the first inst at NYork & was carried to Newport on the 3rd & buried in the Jews Burying ground there. Tho’ he was not by profession a Christian but a Jew, yet he possessed some of the promonent Christian virtues & was a very kind & good friend to me in many respects - I loved him & hope he has gone to rest thro’ the intercession of Jesus Christ our Lord.- RELIGIOUS SOCIETY OF FRIENDS

Fall: The Boston firm of Carter and Hendee published Bronson Alcott’s OBSERVATIONS ON THE PRINCIPLES AND METHODS OF INFANT INSTRUCTION as a 27-page pamphlet. This publication would attract the attention of the Quaker financier Reuben Haines of Germantown, a Philadelphia suburb. THE ALCOTT FAMILY Infant happiness should be but another name for infant progress.

The Dickinsons moved into their newly purchased home in Amherst, Massachusetts. HDT WHAT? INDEX

EMILY DICKINSON EMILY DICKINSON October 15, Friday: Helen Fiske was born in Amherst, Massachusetts. She and another faculty child, Emily Dickinson, would play together and would attend one year of grammar school together at the Amherst Academy. HELEN HUNT JACKSON

A convict ship, the Lady Harewood, set sail from England for New South Wales, Australia. Of the 216 convicts undergoing transportation, 62 had received life sentences and the average sentence was 8 years.

When no white Boston church would allow use of their space for such questionable activities as developing among white Americans an opposition to the peculiar institution of human enslavement, it was arranged for William Lloyd Garrison to deliver his lecture at Julien Hall, the site usually used by such marginal folks as the

Freethinkers’ Society and Abner Kneeland’s Universalist Society. The Reverend Lyman Beecher attended and would term Garrison’s ideas not only misguided but dangerously fanatical (Beecher had been a hero of Garrison’s, but this would put an end to that). Also present at the speech in that packed chamber, but approving of it, were the Reverend Samuel Eliot Sewall and his cousin, the Reverend Samuel J. May, Jr., and Sam’s new brother-in-law Bronson Alcott. HDT WHAT? INDEX

EMILY DICKINSON EMILY DICKINSON

The Reverend May had come from his home in Connecticut to visit with family and friends and had been attracted by a newspaper advertisement to this series of lectures on “the awful sinfulness of slaveholding” in which the “duplicity of the American Colonization Society” would be exposed and “immediate, unconditional emancipation” would be proclaimed to be “the right of every slave and the duty of every master.” May was particularly affected by the fact that with Boston’s church doors being closed, such lectures were possible only due to the generosity of such as Abner Kneeland –this municipality’s reigning atheist– at the Freethinkers’ Society. Present were Lyman Beecher (disapproving), and Unitarian ministers Samuel HDT WHAT? INDEX

EMILY DICKINSON EMILY DICKINSON Sewall and Samuel J. May (highly approving). They noticed the presence of the Reverend Ezra Stiles Gannett. Deacon Moses Grant was in attendance, and John Tappan. The burden of Garrison’s talk was that to speak of “a republican or Christian slaveholder” was as self-contradictory as to speak of “a religious atheist, a sober drunkard, or an honest thief.” Trying to remain a Christian and a true American citizen while holding other Americans in slavery was about as nonsensical as squandering one’s life in an attempt to square the circle or devise a perpetual-motion machine. After the lecture Sam suggested:

We ought to know him. We ought to help him. Come, let us go and give him our hands.

The Reverends Sewall and May took Garrison to Alcott’s rooms and they all talked to this misguided and dangerous fanatic ’till midnight! The Reverends Sewall and May promised not only moral but also financial support, and Garrison, at that point but 25 years old, would eventually become Sam’s best friend.

December 10, Friday: All Boston froze, “shrank, braced and blued with a steady cold that deepened without a break from December 10 through Christmas. ...” In his letters, Waldo Emerson was repeating the sentiment “God save the poor.”

A 2d child, Emily Elizabeth Dickinson, was born to Mr. and Mrs. Edward Dickinson and Emily Norcross Dickinson. EMILY DICKINSON HDT WHAT? INDEX

EMILY DICKINSON EMILY DICKINSON

1833

February 28, Thursday: A 3d child, Lavinia Norcross Dickinson, was born to Mr. and Mrs. Edward Dickinson and Emily Norcross Dickinson. The toddler Emily Elizabeth Dickinson, meanwhile, had been taken to Monson, Massachusetts. HDT WHAT? INDEX

EMILY DICKINSON EMILY DICKINSON

1835

August 4, Tuesday: Edward Dickinson was hired as treasurer of Amherst College. HDT WHAT? INDEX

EMILY DICKINSON EMILY DICKINSON

1837

January: Edward Dickinson was off his 1st term in the Massachusetts legislature.

David Henry Thoreau the Harvard College senior was assigned by Professor Channing an essay on the topic of L’ALLEGRO & IL PENSEROSO, and he kicked off this topic with a comment by Dr. Samuel Johnson, who had well observed in his biographical notice of John Milton that “No mirth can indeed be found in his melancholy; but I am afraid that I always meet some melancholy in his mirth.” Thoreau turned this snippet into a hook upon which to hang his essay by characterizing it as a “transition from L’Allegro to Il Penseroso.” THE ACTUAL DOCUMENT

However, this Harvard senior also wrote, in a more serious vein, that:

[T]ime loiters in his course, were it for but a moment –past –present –future –mingle as one.

TIME AND ETERNITY

It is my opinion that Thoreau was in possession of an attitude about perspectival space and of the eternity behind time which was fully formed by the point at which he copied his first journals into the first record we have of these journals, the new blank book he began in 1837 as “Gleanings — Or What Time Has Not Reaped Of My Journal.” Presumably these ideas antedate 1837 to at least some extent, for in an essay written in September 1836, his Junior year at Harvard, speaking of the human imagination, he wrote:

Its province is unbounded, its flights are not confined to space, the past and the future, time and eternity, all come within the sphere of its range.

However, the manner in which Thoreau held this attitude, and the manner in which he sought to communicate it to others, do seem to have developed over time, as his communication skills were elaborated by his experience as a writer and as a lecturer, and as he observed more and more the consequences in the lives of others of other sorts of attitude toward time and eternity.

{1/3d of the sheet is missing} college {the remainder of the line has been torn away} bright spot in the student’s history, a cloud by day, a pillar of fire by night, shedding a grateful lustre over long years of toil, and cheering him onward to the end of his pilgrimage. Immured within the dank but classic walls of a Stoughton or Hollis his wearied and {a sheet, or perhaps more, is missing here} The precise date of these poems is not known, they were probably, however, together with his Comus and Lycidas, the fruit of those five years of literary leisure, from 1632 to 1637, which our author is known to have spent at Horton, in Buckinghamshire. Surely {about 5/6ths of the sheet is missing} so faithfully the spirit of its divine Author? They were first published in 1645, but for nearly a century obtained but little notice from the lovers of polite literature, the Addisons and Popes of the day. They are thought, by Dr. Warton, to have been originally indebted to Handels’ music for whatever notice they at last obtained. L’Allegro is not an effort of Genius, but rather an out-pouring of poetic feeling. We have here a succession of pleasing and striking HDT WHAT? INDEX

EMILY DICKINSON EMILY DICKINSON images, which are dwelt upon just long enough. {the remainder of the line has been torn away} at {a sheet, or perhaps more, is missing here} never been heard of since the days of Robinhood. The metre of these verses is admirably adapted to the subject. The reader can hardly believe that he is not one of the party, tripping it over hill and dale “on the light fantastic toe”. A verse of poetry should strike the reader, as it did the poet, as a whole, not so much as the sign of an idea as that idea itself.

–As Imagination bodies forth The forms of things unknown, the Poet’s pen Turns them to shapes—

{the first half of the line has been torn away} to which they are already {about 1/3d of the sheet is missing} in every respect, so as to satisfy its aerial occupant, it is enough, whatever may be the order of architecture. Thus was it with our architect. But the parts and members of his verses are equally appropriate and striking. With the idea comes the very word, if its sense is not wanted, its sound is. But lo! the sun is up, the hounds are out, the ploughman has already driven his team afield, and as he gaily treads the fragrant furrow, his merry whistle “is heard the fields around,” responsive to the milkmaid’s song, who now repairs with pail on head, and quick elastic step, to her humble stool. The mower, too, has commenced his labors in the meadow at hand,

And every shepherd tells his tale Under the hawthorne in the dale.

Such a picture of rural felicity as is presented in these and the following lines, is rarely to be met with even in poetry. Fancy has her hands full, a thousand images are flitting before her, bringing with them a crowd of delightful associations, and she is forced, in spite of herself, to join the revel and thread the mazes of the dance. And then for

the spicy nut-brown ale, With stories told of many a feat—

There are the “delights”, the “recreations and jolly pastimes that will fetch the day about from sun to sun, and rock the tedious year as in a delightful dream”. The poet leaves not a single chord untouched if the reader will but yield himself up to his influence. This whole poem is to be regarded rather as a “sweet digression” than an elaborate effort, as an effusion rather than a production. Johnson has well observed, in his biographical notice of Milton, “No mirth can indeed be found in his melancholy; but I am afraid that I always meet some melancholy in his mirth.” His mirth wears a pensive hue, his melancholy is but a pleasing contemplative mood. The transition from L’Allegro to Il Penseroso is by no means abrupt, the vain deluding joys which are referred to in the commencement of the latter, are not those unreproved pleasures which the poet has just recounted, for they are by no means inconsistent with that soft melancholy which he paints, but rather, the fickle pensioners of that Euphrosyne whose sister graces are Meat and Drink, a very different crew from that which waits upon the “daughter fair” of Zephyr and Aurora. The latter are content with daylight and a HDT WHAT? INDEX

EMILY DICKINSON EMILY DICKINSON moderate portion of the night — when tales are done

— “to bed they creep, By whispering winds soon lulled asleep.”

but the others proceed to evening amusements, and even to the London theatres, and the “well-trod stage,” —but only

“If Jonson’s learned sock be on, Or sweetest Shakspeare, Fancy’s child, Warble his native wood-notes wild.”

Beginning with the warning to idle joys, that they depart and leave the poet to “divinest Melancholy,” we soon come to that picture of her, perhaps, the finest in the whole poem. A sable stole thrown over her decent shoulders, with slow and measured steps, and looks that hold “sweet converse” with the skies, reflecting a portion of their own placidness, she gradually draws near. But lo! the “cherub contemplation” delays her lingering steps, her eyes upraised to heaven, the earth is for a space forgot — time loiters in his course, were it but for a moment — past — present — future — mingle as one {about 2 1/2 sheets are missing} The picture of Morning in “Il Penseroso” differs greatly from that in “L’Allegro,” and introduces that mention of the storm-wind in a cloudy day,—

“When rocking winds are piping loud,”—

a very poetic touch. A later poet, Thomson, attributes its sighing to the “sad Genius of the coming storm,” Gray too, seems to have been equally affected by it. “Did you never observe,” he writes, “that pause, as the gust is recollecting itself, and rising upon the ear in a shrill and plaintive tone, like the swell of an Æolian harp? I do assure you there is nothing in the world so like the voice of a spirit.” We are told, that it was while exposed to a violent storm of wind and rain, attended by frequent flashes of lightning, anong [sic] the wilds of Glen-Ken, in Galloway, that Burns composed his far-famed song, the “Scots wha hae wi’ Wallace bled”. Ossian was the child of the storm, its music was ever grateful to his ear. Hence his poetry breathes throughout a tempestuous spirit — when read, as it should be, at the still hour of night, the very rustling of a leaf stirred by the impatient reader, seems to his excited imagination the fitful moaning of the wind, or sighings of the breeze. But if Milton’s winds rock they pipe also, even the monotony of a summer shower is relieved by the cheerful pattering of ‘minute drops from off the eaves’, and if the heavens are for a few moments overcast, the splendor of the succeeding sunshine is heightened by contrast. It is amusing to know that Milton was a performer on the bass-viol. He is said even to have been a composer, though nothing remains to prove the assertion. It was his practice, say his biographers, when he hae dined to play on some musical instrument, and either sing himself or make his wife sing, who, he said, had a good voice but no ear. This partiality for the sister muse is no where more manifest than in these poems; whether in; a mirthful or a pensive mood, the “linked sweetness” of “soft Lydian airs”, “the pealing organ”, or ‘the full-voiced quire’, ‘dissolve him into ecstasies.’ HDT WHAT? INDEX

EMILY DICKINSON EMILY DICKINSON These poems are to be valued, if for no other reason, on account of the assistance they afford us in forming our estimate of the man Milton. They place him in an entirely new, and extremely pleasing, light to the reader who was previously familiar with him as the author of the Paradise Lost alone. If before he venerated, he may now admire and love him. The immortal Milton seems for a space to have put on mortality, to have snatched a moment from the weightier cares of heaven and hell, to wander for awhile among the sons of men. But we mistake; though his wings, as he tells us, were already sprouted, he was as yet content to linger awhile, with childlike affection, amid the scenes of his native earth. The tenor of these verses is in keeping with the poets’ early life; he was, as he confesses, a reader of romances, an occasional frequenter of the playhouse, and not at all averse to spending a cheerful evening, now and then, with some kindred spirits about town. We see nothing here of the Puritan. the “storied windows” which were afterwards an abomination in his eyes, admit a welcome, though sombre, light. The learning of Johnson [sic], and the wild notes of Shakspeare, are among the last resources of the mirthful L’Allegro. The student of Milton will ever turn with satisfaction from contemplating the stern and consistent non conformist, and bold defender of civil and religious liberty, engaged, but not involved, in a tedious and virulent controversy,

With darkness and with dangers compassed round,

his dearest hopes disappointed, and himself shut out from the cheering light of day, to these fruits of his earlier and brighter years; though of the earth, yet the flights of one who was contemplating to soar ‘Above the Aonian mount’, a heavenward and unattempted course. I have not undertaken to write a critique, I have dwelt upon the poet’s beauties and not so much as glanced at his blemishes. This may be the result of pure selfishness; Poetry is but a recreation. A pleasing image, or a fine sentiment, loses none of its charms, though Burton, or Beaumont and Fletcher, or Marlowe, or Sir Walter Raleigh, may have written something very similar; or even, in another connexion, have used the identical word whose aptness we so much admire. It always appeared to me that that contemptible kind of criticism which can deliberately, and in cold blood, dissect the sublimest passage, and take pleasure in the detection of slight verbal incongruities, was, when applied to Milton, little better than sacrilege, and that those critics who condescended to practice it, were to be ranked with the parish officers who, prompted by a profane and mercenary spirit, tore from their grave and exposed for sale, what were imagined to be the remains of Milton. HDT WHAT? INDEX

EMILY DICKINSON EMILY DICKINSON

1838

January: It became possible, if one changed trains several times, to make it all the way from Boston to Albany by railroad.

Edward Dickinson was off his 2d term in the Massachusetts legislature. HDT WHAT? INDEX

EMILY DICKINSON EMILY DICKINSON

1839

January: While attending Harvard College’s law school,2 Richard Henry Dana, Jr. was appointed to instruct in elocution at the college (he would resign during February 1840).

Edward Dickinson was off his 3d term in the Massachusetts legislature.

November: Edward Dickinson failed to gain a nomination for the Congress.

The Reverend Samuel Ringgold Ward became the traveling agent of the American Anti-slavery Society (afterward, of the New York Anti-slavery Society). I made my début as a lecturer. It cost me a great deal of effort and self-denial. My youthful wife and my infant boy I must leave, to go hundreds of miles, travelling in all weathers, meeting all sorts of people, combatting some of the most deeply seated prejudices, and in the majority of instances denied the ordinary courtesies of civilized life. I suffered more than can be here described. At length I considered that every Christian has not only a cross to bear, but his peculiar cross; and that God, not man, must judge and decide in what shape that cross must come: aye, and he too would give grace to bear it. Thus fortified, I went forth; and from that day to this I have never been able to see this travelling, homeless, wandering part of the work in any other light than a cross. No place can be a substitute for home, though the latter be a hovel, the former a palace. No observer can enter into one’s inner feelings, live over again one’s life, as does the loving wife. In sickness, in sorrow, to be away from home adds mountain weights to what the wanderer’s bosom must bear; and I may as well add, that the poisoned tongue of censure — cool, deliberate, granite-hearted censure — censure from unbridled but professedly Christian tongues, to be found alike on both sides of the Atlantic, even among brethren and others — doth not diminish the rigour of the cross. Still, with God’s blessing I went forth, making my first speech at a private house, and afterwards speaking in public places until I become accustomed somewhat to the sound of my own voice, and a little skilled in the handling of the subject, receiving kind encouragement from one friend and another....

2. Just in case you didn’t know: Harvard Law School had been founded with money from the selling of slaves in the sugarcane fields of Antigua. HDT WHAT? INDEX

EMILY DICKINSON EMILY DICKINSON

1840

March: Portraits were painted for the Dickinsons of Amherst, Massachusetts by O.A. Bullard.

In New-York, Alexander Wolcott and John Johnson, two associates of Samuel F.B. Morse, opened the 1st US US Daguerreotype studio.

HOW TO TELL THEM APART:

Daguerreotype direct positive, mirrorlike surface shifts from positive August 19, 1839- reversed image to negative as you tilt it circa 1860 Ambrotype direct positive, pry the sheets apart and shine a light 1855-circa 1865 reversed image through from the back to verify that the image is negative Carte de Visite non-reversed wedding band is on the proper hand, 1854-circa 1925 image you can read the titles of books, and clothing is buttoned properly for each gender “Tintype” direct positive, The metal is attracted to a magnet 1856-circa 1945 (Ferrotype) reversed image and there is no mirror appearance

April: The Dickinsons of Amherst, Massachusetts moved from their homestead to a frame house on Pleasant Street.

While the American Anti-Slavery Society was splitting over issues of the participation of women, and its political activity, Theodore Dwight Weld and the Grimké sisters were attempting uncomfortably to remain neutral and uncommitted. Angelina Emily Grimké Weld became again pregnant. SEXISM

THE TASK OF THE HISTORIAN IS TO CREATE HINDSIGHT WHILE INTERCEPTING ANY ILLUSION OF FORESIGHT. NOTHING A HUMAN CAN SEE CAN EVER BE SEEN AS IF THROUGH THE EYE OF GOD. THE UNIVERSITY OF COLORADO’S CENTER OF THE AMERICAN WEST HAS AS ITS OFFICIAL MOTTO “TURNING HINDSIGHT INTO FORESIGHT” — WHICH INDICATES THAT ONLY PANDERERS ARE WELCOME THERE. IN A BOOK THAT IS SUPPOSED TO BE ABOUT HISTORY, ISSUED BY RANDOM HOUSE IN 2016, I FIND THE PHRASE “LOOKED UPON FROM THE BIRD’S-EYE VIEW OF HISTORY, ....” ONLY A MERE STORYTELLER, NEVER A HISTORIAN, COULD HAVE PENNED SUCH A PHRASE — HDT WHAT? INDEX

EMILY DICKINSON EMILY DICKINSON BECAUSE NO BIRD HAS EVER FLOWN OVER HISTORY.

September 7, Monday: Emily Dickinson and Lavinia Dickinson began their 1st year at Amherst Academy.

Emily Dickinson “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project HDT WHAT? INDEX

EMILY DICKINSON EMILY DICKINSON

1841

November: The newlywed Ellery Channing took a subeditor job on the Cincinnati Gazette at a salary that was supposed to amount to $400.00 per year.

Edward Dickinson won election to the Massachusetts Senate. HDT WHAT? INDEX

EMILY DICKINSON EMILY DICKINSON

1842

April: Angelina Emily Grimké Weld and Theodore Dwight Weld had abandoned their anti-slavery crusade in the form in which they had been conducting it, and had retreated to a farm near Bellesville, New Jersey. The excuse Weld was giving was that he had damaged his vocal chords, but in fact there was an intellectual and emotional and spiritual basis for this abandonment. The two of them had become more and more skeptical of that sort of evangelism, and had begun to fear even that it would prove to be a preamble for disillusion, then bitterness, then retribution. The sponsor Lewis Tappan had been appealing to the foot soldiers to “wage war with sin & Satan,” but one visitor brought away from this farm the news that these foot soldiers felt as if they had been “laboring to destroy evil” in the same spirit as that in which the perpetrators of the evil of slavery had been enacting and perpetuating it. They said had come to recognize that “fighting was not the best way to annihilate error.”

During this month or the following one, Emily Dickinson wrote the 1st of her letters still to be preserved, to her brother Austin Dickinson at Williston Seminary and to Jane Humphrey.

November: Edward Dickinson again won election to the Massachusetts Senate.

Waldo Emerson noted in his JOURNAL that:

Last night Henry Thoreau read me verses which pleased if not by beauty of particular lines, yet by the honest truth, and by the length of flight & strength of wing; for, most of our poets are only writers of lines or of epigrams. These of H.T. at least have rude strength, & we do not come to the bottom of the mine. Their fault is, that the gold does not yet flow pure, but is drossy & crude. The thyme & marjoram are not yet made into honey; the assimilation is imperfect.... But it is a great pleasure, to have poetry of the second degree also, & mass here as in other instances is some compensation for superior quality for I find myself stimulated & rejoiced like one who should see a cargo of sea-shells discharged on the wharf, whole boxes & crates of conchs, cypraeas, cones, neritas, cardiums, murexes, though there should be no pearl oyster nor one shell of great rarity & value among them. HDT WHAT? INDEX

EMILY DICKINSON EMILY DICKINSON

1844

April 29, day: Emily Dickinson’s friend Sophia Holland died. In an attempt to improve her spirits, Emily would be sent off to Boston.

June: Emily Dickinson returned from Boston to Amherst, Massachusetts.

Brook Farm added the following new recruits:

Name Birthplace Birthdate Occupation

Frederick Cabot Boston MA 1822 clerk

Mary Dwight West Newbury MA 1792 mother of minister

Marianne Dwight Boston MA 1816 teacher

Benjamin Fitch Temple NH 1810 farmer

Francis Dwight Boston MA 1819 sister of minister

Flavel Patterson Lunenburg MA 1806 carpenter

Caroline Patterson Charlestown MA 1815 wife of carpenter

Rebecca Codman Charlestown MA 1798 wife of a mechanic

December: John Adolphus Etzler’s ideas in general and his emigration plan in particular were given a further boost with the appearance of James Duncan’s paper The Morning Star, or Herald of Progression, which was to become an official organ for his theories.

There was a religious revival in Amherst, Massachusetts. EMILY DICKINSON

Brook Farm added the following new recruits:

Name Birthplace Birthdate Occupation

John Hoxie Boston MA ? ?

Jeanne Palisse Switzerland 1802 manufacturer

Eunice Macdaniel Washington DC 1824 sister of a journalist who was not a member

Francis Macdaniel Washington DC ??

Eliza Palisse Weymout ? ? ?

John Sawyer ? ? ? HDT WHAT? INDEX

EMILY DICKINSON EMILY DICKINSON

Name Birthplace Birthdate Occupation

Lydia Smith Lancaster ? ? ?

Henry Trask ? ? ?

Clinton, A Cambridgeport MA ? ? HDT WHAT? INDEX

EMILY DICKINSON EMILY DICKINSON

1845

May: A silhouette of Emily Dickinson was cut by Charles Temple.

In Lincoln, Massachusetts, birth of a daughter to Mary Field and John Field, as would be mentioned in 3 WALDEN:

WALDEN: But therein, as I found, dwelt now John Field, an PEOPLE OF Irishman, and his wife, and several children, from the broad- WALDEN faced boy who assisted his father at his work, and now came running by his side from the bog to escape the rain, to the wrinkled, sibyl-like, cone-headed infant that sat upon its father’s knee as in the palaces of nobles, and looked out from its home in the midst of wet and hunger inquisitively upon the stranger, with the privilege of infancy, not knowing but it was the last of a noble line, and the hope and cynosure of the world, instead of John Field’s poor starveling brat.

TIMELINE OF WALDEN

July: Emily Dickinson began to receive piano lessons.

After considering enrolling in the seminary of St. Sulpice in Paris, or the Urban College in Rome, Isaac Hecker concluded that he had been most impressed by the manner in which the Redemptorist order4 combined the active and contemplative aspects of the priesthood.

On nomination by Dr. Samuel George Morton and Messrs. John S. Phillips and John Cassin, in recognition of his work on snails, Dr. Joseph Leidy was elected a member of the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia, then at the northwest corner of Broad and Sansom streets. He began studies in paleontology.

3. Note that “cone-headed,” an accurate medical description of a neonate condition, is not an epithet of derision. 4. Referred to here as the Redemptorist order is the C. SS. R., the Congregation of the Most Holy Redeemer founded by Saint Alfonso Maria de’Liguori at Scala, Italy in 1732. HDT WHAT? INDEX

EMILY DICKINSON EMILY DICKINSON September: In a gesture designed to honor Daniel O’Connell the Irish patriot for his opposition to African slavery, Frederick Douglass paid a visit to the jail in which O’Connell had been imprisoned in 1843.

When President Tyler annexed the Texas territory, an indignation meeting was held in Concord. Waldo Emerson attended.5

Emily Dickinson was kept at home for that school term at the Amherst Academy.

December: Charles King Newcomb had been in the Brook Farm experiment, with extended visits home to Providence, Rhode Island, since May 1841. At this point he left the community.

Emily Dickinson took instruction in the German language.

5. [Who else attended??] HDT WHAT? INDEX

EMILY DICKINSON EMILY DICKINSON

1846

January: Évariste Régis Huc and Joseph Gabet and their Tibetan convert to Christianity reached Lhasa, Tibet. They were well received by the Tibetans themselves, but —does this remind you of any news story of more recent vintage?— nevertheless Chinese Imperial commissioners obtained their expulsion.

During this month and the following 2 months, Emily Dickinson was writing confessional letters to her female friend Abiah Root.

July: William Lloyd Garrison embarked for England.

Emily Dickinson withdrew from the Amherst Academy on account of ill health.

Late Summer: Henry Thoreau was making a study of the BHAGAVAD-GITA while Emily Dickinson, 16 years old, who had just withdrawn from Amherst Academy on account of ill health, was on tour in Boston. She saw Mount Auburn Cemetery, Bunker Hill, the Horticultural Exhibit, and the Chinese Museum. She attended two concerts, commented she was “not happy, but contented,” and was glad to return to her family and friends in Amherst MA. She would not be eager to repeat such a visit.

At some point Emily wrote about this museum visit, reporting that she had been particularly impressed with the two former opium eaters who had left behind family and friends and come to America to overcome their addiction: “There is something peculiarly interesting to me in their self denial.” HDT WHAT? INDEX

EMILY DICKINSON EMILY DICKINSON December 2, Wednesday: Emily Dickinson resumed her studies at the Amherst Academy.

A deed of sale was witnessed by Henry Thoreau, for purchase for $1,239.56 of 41 acres at Walden Pond by

Waldo Emerson. TIMELINE OF WALDEN

By this point in time Thoreau had finished his draft account of his visit to Maine, the one into which his readings in Herman Melville’s TYPEE had been interpolated. Eventually this reading would show up in the HDT WHAT? INDEX

EMILY DICKINSON EMILY DICKINSON published WALDEN; OR, LIFE IN THE WOODS, in masked form as follows:

WALDEN: The manufacturers have learned that this taste is merely whimsical. Of two patterns which differ only by a few threads more or less of a particular color, the one will be sold readily, the other lie on the shelf, though it frequently happens that after the lapse of a season the latter becomes the most fashionable. Comparatively, tattooing is not the hideous custom which it is called. It is not barbarous merely because the printing is skin- deep and unalterable.

Dec 2nd 23 geese in the pond this morn. flew over my house about 10 ’oclock in morn within gun shot. The ground has been covered with snow since Nov. 25th {Three-fourths page missing} {leaf missing} add lest one ray more than usual come into our eyes –a little information from the western heavens –and where are we?– ubique gentium sumus!– where are we as it is? Who shall say what is? He can only say how he sees. One man sees 100 stars in the heavens –another sees 1000– There is no doubt of it –but why should they turn HDT WHAT? INDEX

EMILY DICKINSON EMILY DICKINSON their backs on one another, & join different sects– As for the reality no man sees it –but some see more and some less– what ground then is there to quarrel on? No man lives in that world which I inhabit –or ever came rambling into it– Nor did I ever journey in any other man’s– Our differences have frequently such foundation VENUS as if venus should roll quite near to the orbit of the earth one day –and two inhabitants of the respective planets should take the opportunity to lecture one another I have noticed that if a man thinks he needs 1000 dollars & cant be convinced that he does not –he will be found to have it. If he lives & thinks a thousand dollars will be forthcoming –though it be to by shoe-strings –they have got to come. 1000 mills will be just as hard to come to one who finds it equally hard to convince himself that he needs them. — — Of Emerson’s Essays I should say that they were not poetry –that they were not written exactly at the right crisis though inconceivably near to it. Poetry is simply a miracle & we only recognize it receding from us not coming toward us– It yields only tints & hues of thought like the clouds which reflect the sun –& not distinct propositions– In poetry the sentence is as one word –whose syllables are words– They do not convey thoughts but some of the health which he had inspired– It does not deal in thoughts –they are indifferent to it– A poem is one undivided unimpeded expression –fallen ripe into literature The poet has opened his heart and still lives– And it is undividedly and unimpededly received by those for whom it was matured –but mortal eye can never dissect it– while it sees it is blinded. The wisest man –though he should get all the academies in the world to help him cannot add to or subtract one syllable from the line of poetry. If you can speak what you {Three leaves missing} and crownings. As the youth studies minutely the order and the degrees in the imperial procession and suffered none of its effect to be lost on him –so the man at last secured a rank in society which satisfied his notion of fitness & respectability He was defrauded of so much which the savage boy enjoys. Indeed he himself has occasion to say in this very autobiography, when at last he escapes into the woods without the gates –“Thus much is certain, that only the undefinable, wide-expanding feelings of youth and of uncultivated nations are adapted to the sublime, which, whenever it may be excited in us through external objects, since it is either formless, or else moulded into forms which are incomprehensible, must surround us with a grandeur which we find above our reach.” He was even too well-bred to be thoroughly bred. He says that he had had no intercourse with the lowest class of his townsmen– The child should have the full advantage of ignorance as well as of knowledge –& is fortunate if he gets his share of neglect and exposure. “The law of nature break the rules of art” He further says of himself “I had lived among painters from my childhood, and had accustomed myself to look at objects, as they did, with reference to art.” This was his peculiarity in after years. His writings are not the inspiration of nature into his soul –but his own observations rather.”

After December 2: When I am stimulated by reading the biographies of literary men to adopt some method of educating myself and directing my studies –I can only resolve to keep unimpaired the freedom & wakefulness of my genius. I will not seek to accomplish much in breadth and bulk and loose my self in industry but keep my celestial relations fresh. No method or discipline can supersede the necessity of being forever on the alert– What is a course of History –no matter how well selected –or the most admirable routine of life –and fairest relation to society –when one is reminded that he may be a Seer that to keep his eye constantly on the true and real is a discipline that will absorb every other. How can he appear or be seen to be well employed to the mass of men whose profession it is to climb resolutely the heights of life –and never lose a step he has taken Let the youth seize upon the finest and most memorable experience in his life –that which most reconciled him to his unknown destiny –and seek to discover in it his future path. Let him be sure that that way is his only true and worthy career. Every mortal sent into this world has a star in the heavens appointed to guide him– Its ray he cannot mistake– It has sent its beam to him either through clouds and mists faintly or through a serene heaven– He knows better than to seek advice of any. This world is no place for the exercise of what is called common sense. This world would be denied. Of how much improvement a man is susceptible –and what are the methods? When I meet the engine with its train of cars moving off with planetary motion or say rather like a comet –for the beholder knows not if with that velocity and that direction it will ever revisit this system –its steam-cloud like a banner streaming behind like such a fleecy cloud as I have seen in a summer’s day –high in the heavens unfolding its wreathed masses to the light –as if this travelling and aspiring man would ere long take the sunset sky for his train in livery when he travelled – When I have heard the iron horse make the hills echo with his snort like thunder, shaking the earth –with his feet and breathing fire and smoke– It seems to me that the earth has got a race now that deserves to inhabit it. If all were as it seems, and men made the elements their servants HDT WHAT? INDEX

EMILY DICKINSON EMILY DICKINSON for noble ends. If the cloud that hangs over the engine were the perspiration of heroes or as innocent and beneficent an omen as that which hovers over the parched fields of the farmer. If the elements did not have to lament their time wasted in accompanying men on their errands. If this enterprise were as noble as it seems. The stabler was up early this winter morning by the light of the stars to fodder and harness his steed –fire was awakened too to get him off– If the enterprise were as innocent as it is early– For all the day he flies over the country stopping only that his master may rest– If the enterprise were as disinterested as it is unwearied.– And I am awakened by its tramp and defiant snort at midnight while in some far glen it fronts the elements encased in ice and snow and will only reach its stall to start once more If the enterprise were as important as it is protracted. No doubt there is to follow a moral advantage proportionate to this physical one Astronomy is that department of physics which answers to Prophesy the Seer’s or Poets calling It is a mild a patient deliberate and contemplative science. To see more with the physical eye than man has yet seen to see farther, and off the planet –into the system. Shall a man stay on this globe without learning something –without adding to his knowledge –merely sustaining his body and with morbid anxiety saving his soul. This world is not a place for him who does not discover its laws. Dull Despairing and brutish generations have left the race where they found it or in deeper obscurity and night –impatient and restless ones have wasted their lives in seeking after the philosopher’s stone and the elixir of life– These are indeed within the reach of science –but only of a universal and wise science to which an enlightened generation may one day attain. The wise will bring to the task patience humility (serenity) –joy – resolute labor and undying faith.I had come over the hills on foot and alone in serene summer days travelling early in the morning and resting at noon in the shade by the side of some stream and resuming my journey in the cool of the evening– With a knapsack on my back which held a few books and a change of clothing, and a stout staff in my hand. I had looked down from Hoosack mountain where the road crosses it upon the village of North Adams in the valley 3 miles away under my feet –showing how uneven the earth sometimes is and making us wonder that it should ever be level and convenient for man, or any other creatures than birds. As the mountain which now rose before me in the Southwest so blue and cloudy was my goal I did not stop long in this village but buying a little rice and sugar which I put into my knapsack and a pint tin dipper I began to ascend the mt whose summit was 7 or 8 miles distant by the path. My rout lay up a long and spacious valley sloping up to the very clouds, between the principle ridge and a lower elevation called the Bellows. There were a few farms scattered along at different elevations each commanding a noble prospect of the mountains to the north, and a stream ran down the middle of the valley, on which near the head there was a mill It seemed a very fit rout for the pilgrim to enter upon who is climbing to the gates of heaven– now I crossed a hay field, and now over the brook upon a slight bridge still gradually ascending all the while with a sort of awe and filled with indefinable expectations as to what kind of inhabitants and what kind of nature I should come to at last– And now it seemed some advantage that the earth was uneven, for you could not imagine a more noble position for a farm and farm house than this vale afforded farther or nearer from its head, from all the seclusion of the deepest glen overlooking the country from a great elevation –between these two mountain walls. It reminded me of the homesteads on Staten Island, on the coast of New Jersey– This island which is about 18 miles in length, and rises gradually to the height of 3 or 400 feet in the centre, commands fine views in every direction, whether on the side of the continent or the ocean –and southward it looks over the outer bay of New York to Sandy Hook and the Highlands of Neversink, and over long island quite to the open sea toward the shore of europe. HUGUENOTS There are sloping valleys penetrating the island in various directions gradually narrowing and rising to the central table land and at the head of these the Hugenots the first settlers placed their houses quite in the land in healthy and sheltered places from which they looked out serenely through a widening vista over a distant salt prairie and then over miles of the Atlantic –to some faint vessel in the horizon almost a days sail on her voyage to Europe whence they had come. From these quiet nooks they looked out with equal security on calm and storm on fleets which were spell bound and loitering on the coast for want of wind and on tempest & shipwreck. I have been walking in the interior seven or eight miles from the shore, in the midst of rural scenery where there was as little to remind me of the ocean as amid these N H hills when suddenly through a gap in the hills –a cleft or “Clove road”, as the Dutch settlers called it I caught sight of a ship under full sail over a corn field 20 or thirty miles at sea. The effect was similar to seeing the objects in a magic lantern, passed back and forth by day-light since I had no means of measuring distance. HDT WHAT? INDEX

EMILY DICKINSON EMILY DICKINSON

1847

In the town of South Hadley, Miss Emily Dickinson began to attend the Mount Holyoke Female Seminary, and late in this year she would have her Daguerreotype made.6

6. It is now at the Amherst College Library. HDT WHAT? INDEX

EMILY DICKINSON EMILY DICKINSON Incidentally, here is the above image, unretouched and uncropped: HDT WHAT? INDEX

EMILY DICKINSON EMILY DICKINSON August: This month would mark the end of Emily Dickinson’s 7th and final year at the Amherst Academy. In the next month she would be matriculating at Mt. Holyoke Female Seminary in South Hadley.

September 30, Thursday: Emily Dickinson matriculated at Mt. Holyoke Female Seminary in South Hadley, Massachusetts.

Henry Thoreau responded from Concord to an inquiry about his activities a decade after graduation from Harvard College from Class of 1837 secretary Henry W. Williams, Jr.: Concord Sept 30th 1847

Dear Sir, I confess that I have very little class spirit, and have almost forgotten that I ever spent four years at Cambridge. That must have been in a former state of existence. It is difficult to realize that the old routine is still kept up. However, I will undertake at last to answer your questions as well as I can in spite of a poor memory and a defect of information

1st then, I was born, they say, on the 12th of July 1817, on what is called the Virginia Road, in the east part of Concord.

2nd I was fitted, or rather made unfit, for College, at Concord Acad- emy & elsewhere, mainly by myself, with the countenance of Phin- eas Allen, Preceptor.

3rd I am not married.

4th I dont know whether mine is a profession, or a trade, or what not. It is not yet learned, and in every instance has been practised before being studied. The mercantile part of it was begun here by myself alone. –It is not one but legion. I will give you some of the monster's heads. I am a School-master –a Private Tutor, a Surveyor –a Gardener, a Farmer –a Painter, I mean a House Painter, a Carpenter, a Mason, a Day-laborer, a Pencil-Maker, a Glass-paper Maker, a Writer, and sometimes a Poetaster. If you will act the part of Iolas, and apply a hot iron to any of these heads, I shall be greatly obliged to you. PENCILS

5th My present employment is to answer such orders as may be ex- pected from so general an advertisement as the above–that is, if I see fit, which is not always the case, for I have found out a way to live without what is commonly called employment or industry attractive or otherwise. Indeed my steadiest employment, if such it can be called, is to keep myself at the top of my condition, and ready for whatever may turn up in heaven or on earth. For the last two or three years I have lived in Concord woods alone, something more than a mile from any neighbor, in a house built entirely by myself. HDT WHAT? INDEX

EMILY DICKINSON EMILY DICKINSON

6th I cannot think of a single general fact of any importance before or since graduating

Yrs &c Henry D Thoreau

PS. I beg that the Class will not consider me an object of charity, and if any of them are in want of pecuniary assistance, and will make known their case to me, I will engage to give them some advice of more worth than money. PHINEAS ALLEN

December: According to the Pittsburgh Gazette, “Messrs. Blackstock and Co. have made a trial of a smoke preventive apparatus, in their Cotton Factory in Allegany city. The experiment has proved successful. While the chimneys of the neighboring factories were vomiting forth clouds of black smoke that darkened the atmosphere on one of the finest Indian Summer days we have seen, the Smoke Preventive in the cotton factory consumed all the parts of smoke that dropped like rain from other points around us.”

Emily Dickinson had her portrait made by an itinerant Daguerreotypist. HDT WHAT? INDEX

EMILY DICKINSON EMILY DICKINSON HDT WHAT? INDEX

EMILY DICKINSON EMILY DICKINSON

1848

Miss Emily Dickinson wrote from Mt. Holyoke Female Seminary in Massachusetts to her brother Austin HDT WHAT? INDEX

EMILY DICKINSON EMILY DICKINSON Dickinson:

Home was always dear to me ... but never did it seem so dear as now. HDT WHAT? INDEX

EMILY DICKINSON EMILY DICKINSON Emily left the seminary a few months later, coming home to Amherst

cheered by the thought that I am not to return.

January 16, Monday: At Lyceum Hall in Lynn, Massachusetts, Charles Chauncy Shackford delivered “A citizen’s appeal in regard to the war with Mexico.”

To appearances, Emily Dickinson was still remaining unconcerned about the salvation of her immortal soul. HDT WHAT? INDEX

EMILY DICKINSON EMILY DICKINSON February: Walt Whitman, fired from his editing position at the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, left town with his brother Jeff (Thomas Jefferson Whitman) to travel to New Orleans to edit there a new paper to be named the Crescent. This newspaper attempt would last only a few months. BROOKLYN EAGLE

In the period between February and April, a Daguerreotype of Emily Dickinson would be made. It is likely that this happened in that of the Springfield, Massachusetts gallery of Otis H. Cooley, and it is possible that, subsequent to the failure of his medical practice there, the plate was exposed by Josiah Gilbert Holland.

During this year Holland would depart for a teaching position in Richmond, Virginia (and then later in Vicksburg, Mississippi). HDT WHAT? INDEX

EMILY DICKINSON EMILY DICKINSON For the rest of her life, Emily would be writing long letters to Mr. and Mrs. Holland.

March 25, Saturday: Emily Dickinson was so unwell that her brother Austin Dickinson came and took her home from the Mt. Holyoke Female Seminary in South Hadley, to Amherst, Massachusetts.

Henry Thoreau was written to by Waldo Emerson in London. Eat your heart out, home boy, what a pity it is

that you should not see this England, with its indescribable material superiorities of every kind.

London, 25 March, 1848. Dear Henry, Your letter was very welcome and its introduction heartily accepted. In this city & nation of pomps[,] where pomps too are solid, I fall back on my friends with wonderful refresh- ment. It is pity, however, that you should not see this England, with its [indiscribable] material superiorities of every kind; the just confidence which immense successes of all sorts have generated in the Englishman that he can do everything, and which his manners, though he is bashful & reserved, betray; the abridgment of all expression, which dense population [&] the roar of nations enforces; the solidity of science & merit which in any high place you are sure to find (the Church[,] & some effects of primogeniture ex- cepted)[ ]but I cannot tell my story now. I admire the English I think never more than when I meet Americans — as, for example, at Mr[] Bancroft's American soiree, which he holds every Sunday night. — Great is the self respect of Mr Bull. He is very shortsighted & without his HDT WHAT? INDEX

EMILY DICKINSON EMILY DICKINSON eye-glass cannot see as far as your eyes, to know how you like him, so that he quite neglects that point. The Americans see very well, too well, and the travelling portion are very light troops. But I must not vent my ill humour on my poor compatriots[—]they are

Page 2 welcome to their revenge & I am quite sure have no reason to [shave] me if they too are at this hour writing letters to their gossips. I have not gone to Oxford yet, though I still correspond with my friend there, Mr[] Clough. I meet many young men here, who come to me simply[]as one of their School of thought, but not often in this class any giants. A Mr Morell who has written a [H]istory of Philosophy, and Wilkinson who is a [S]ocialist now & gone to France, I have seen with respect. [But] I went last Sun- day for the first time to see Lane at Ham & dined with him. He was full of friendliness & hospitality has a school of 16 children, one lady as matron, then Oldham, — that is all the household. They looked just comfortable. Mr Galpin, tell the Shakers, has married. I spent the most of that day in visiting Hampton Court & Richmond & went also into Popes Grotto at Twickenham & saw Horace Walpoles Villa [at] Strawberry Hill. Ever Your friend, Waldo E. HDT WHAT? INDEX

EMILY DICKINSON EMILY DICKINSON August: Richard Henry Dana, Jr. attended the National Free Soil Party Convention in Buffalo, New York.

THE 2D GREAT AMERICAN DISUNION

The Reverend Daniel Foster left Salem, Massachusetts, where disagreements with influential members of his Congregationalist congregation over anti-slavery politics had rendered him problematic, for Danvers, and was there ordained as a Methodist minister over a fledgling anti-slavery congregation.

May to August was Emily Dickinson’s last period at the Mt. Holyoke Female Seminary in South Hadley, Massachusetts.

Frederick Douglass began a lecture tour of New York, Pennsylvania, and Ohio with William Lloyd Garrison and Stephen Symonds Foster. HDT WHAT? INDEX

EMILY DICKINSON EMILY DICKINSON

1849

January 18, Thursday: J.P. Kimball presented the 3d edition of POEMS, just published by Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes, to Emily Dickinson.

February 14, Wednesday: The Reverend William Cowper Dickinson, a cousin, presented his sister Martha’s copy of the novel PICCIOLA by Joseph Xavier Boniface (X.-B. Saintine) to Emily Dickinson.

August: Waldo Emerson confided to his journal, with characteristic misogyny, that our white women deserve no sympathy — they bring their problems upon themselves by not knowing how to live:

The Indian Squaw with a decisive hat has saved herself a world of vexation. The tragedy of our women begins with the bonnet. Only think of the whole Caucasian race damning the women to cover themselves with this frippery of rye straw & tags, that they may be at the mercy of every shower of rain. A meetinghouse full of women & a shower coming up — it is as if we had dressed them all in paper. Put on the squaw’s man’s hat, & you amputate so much misery.

Benjamin Franklin Newton (1821-1853) of Worcester, Massachusetts presented the white 1847 volume POEMS by Emerson to Emily Dickinson. EMERSON’S POEMS

October 9, Sunday: Edgar Allan Poe’s literary executor Rufus Griswold authored a newspaper obit attacking him, as the body of the former poet was being deposited in an unmarked grave in Baltimore.

The Dickinsons climbed Mt. Holyoke. EMILY DICKINSON HDT WHAT? INDEX

EMILY DICKINSON EMILY DICKINSON

1850

January 11, Friday: At a concert in Paris, Louis Moreau Gottschalk played his new mazurka Fatma for the 1st time in public.

Emily Dickinson wrote a humorous attack letter to her dearest of all dear uncles Joel Warren Norcross, finding him at fault for not having written to her more frequently.

February: Two letters from Lydia Maria Child to Ellis Gray Loring: 1.) Girls Book; “small female minds both sexes”; husband’s creditors and her rights; 2.) Money as priority; dislike “respectable Puritanical.” LETTERS FROM NEW YORK

Emily Dickinson’s valentine to the religious preparatory student George Henry Gould (1827-1881) was published in the Amherst College Indicator: To George H. Gould February 1850 Magnum bonum, “harum scarum,” zounds et zounds, et war alarum, man reforam, life perfectum, mundum changum, all things flarum

Sir, I desire an interview; meet me at sunrise, or sunset, or the new moon—the place is immaterial. In gold, or in purple, or sackcloth—I look not up on the raiment. With sword, or with pen, or with plough—the weapons are less than the wielder. In coach, or in wagon, or walking, the equipage far from the man. With soul, or spirit, or body, they are all alike to me. With host or alone, in sunshine or storm, in heaven or earth, some how or no how—I propose, sir, to see you. And not to see merely, but a chat, sir, or a tete-a-tete, a confab, a mingling of opposite minds is what I propose to have. I feel sir that we shall agree. We will be David and Jonathan, or Damon and Pythias, or what is better, the United States of America. We will talk over what we have learned in our geographies and listened to from the pulpit, the press and the Sabbath School. This is strong language sir, but none the less true. So hurrah for North Carolina, since we are on this point. Our friendship sir, shall endure till sun and moon shall wane no more, till stars shall set, and victims rise to grace the final sacrifice. We’ll be instant, in season, out of season, minister, take care of, cherish, sooth, watch wait, doubt, refrain, reform, elevate, instruct. All choice spirits however distant ours, ours theirs; there is a thrill of sympathy—a circulation of mutuality—cognationem inter nos! I am Judith the heroine of the Apocrypha, and you the orator of Ephesus. That’s what they call a metaphor in our country. Don’t be afraid of it, sir, it won’t bite. If it was my Carlo now! The Dog is the noblest work of Art, sir. I may safely say the noblest—his mistress’s rights he doth defend—although it may bring him to his end – although to death it doth him send! But the world is sleeping in ignorance and error, sir, and we must be crowing cocks, and singing larks, and a rising sun to HDT WHAT? INDEX

EMILY DICKINSON EMILY DICKINSON awake her; or else we’ll pull society up to the roots, and plant it in a different place. We’ll build Alms-houses, and transcendental State prisons, and scaffolds—we will blow out the sun, and the moon, and encourage invention. Alpha shall kiss Omega—we will ride up the hill of glory—hallelujah, all hail! Yours, truly, C.

March/April: Waldo Emerson confessed to having an eye for feminine beauty.

Did one ever see a beautiful woman, & not wish to look again? Could one ever see enough of a beautiful woman?

He commented on the accommodative spirit of the times:

Watson Haynes, the sailor, testified that when he attempted to enlist the Clergy in his crusade against flogging in the navy, they replied, that their business was to preach the gospel, & not to interfere with the regulations of the navy. And Webster thinks the gospel was to touch the heart, & not to abolish slavery.

From March into August there was religious revival in Amherst, Massachusetts, at which Edward Dickinson was converted.

September: Austin Dickinson left Amherst, Massachusetts to begin teaching school in Sunderland.

The initial swampland recovery act of 1849 had “benefited” only Louisiana. At this point, therefore, this misguided agrarian endeavor (read “pork barrel”) was extended by our federal congress to include fifteen other states. “In our efforts to cushion ourselves against smaller, more frequent climate stresses, we have consistently made ourselves more vulnerable to rare but larger catastrophes. The whole course of civilisation ... may be seen as a process of trading up on the scale of vulnerability.” — Brian Fagan, THE LONG SUMMER: HOW CLIMATE CHANGED CIVILISATION. Granta, 2004 HDT WHAT? INDEX

EMILY DICKINSON EMILY DICKINSON November 26, Tuesday: The Reverend Andrews Norton revealed, in a long article in the Boston Atlas, that he was capable of empathizing with people who were struggling to escape from bondage, even if those people were black. In regard to the provisions of the US Constitution, for the return of escaped slaves to their masters, he declared for a straightforward Antinomianism: “The compacts of men cannot annul the laws of God.”7

This night would be long remembered by Emily Dickinson.

Nov. 26th An inch of snow on ground this morning –our first Went tonight to see the Indians who are still living in tents– Showed the horns of the moose, the black moose they call it, that goes in low lands horns 3 or 4 feet wide (The red moose they say is another kind runs on Mts & has horns 6 feet wide) can move their horns. The broad flat side portions of the horns are covered with hair and are so soft when the creature is alive that you can run a knife through them, They color the lower portions a darker color by rubbing them on alders &c to harden them. Make Kee-nong-gun or pappoose cradle of the broad part of the horn, putting a rim on it. Once scared will run all day. A dog will hang to their lips and be DOG carried along and swung against a tree & drop off. Always find 2 or three together. Can’t run on glare ice but can run in snow four feet deep. The caribou can run on ice. Sometimes spear them with a sharp pole –sometimes with a knife at the end of a pole. Signs good or bad from the turn of the horns. Their caribou horns had been gnawed by mice in their wigwams. The moose horns & others are not gnawed by mice while the creature is alive. Moose cover themselves with water all but noses to escape flies. about as many now as 50 years ago. Imitated the sounds of the moose caribou & deer with a birch bark horn which last they sometimes make very long. The moose can be heard 8 or ten miles sometimes a loud sort of bellowing sound clearer more sonorous than the looing of cattle– The caribou’s a sort of snort –the small deer, –like a lamb. Made their clothes of the young moose skin. Cure the meat by smoking it –use no salt in curing it, but when they eat it. Their spear very serviceable. The inner pointed part of a hemlock knot –the side spring pieces of hickory. Spear salmon pickerel –trout –chub &c also by birch-bark light at night using the other end of spear as pole. Their sled Jeborgon or Jebongon? 1 foot wide 4 or 5 long of thin wood turned up in part draw by a strong rope of bass-wood bark– Canoe of moose hide. One hide will hold 3 or 4 –can be taken apart and put together very quickly. Can take out cross bars and bring the sides together a very convenient boat to carry & cross streams with. They say they did not make birch canoes till they had edge tools. The birches the lightest– They think our birches the same only second growth. Their kee-nong-gun or cradle has a hoop to prevent the child being hurt when it falls– Cant eat dirt –can be hung up out of way of snakes. A boak-henjo a birchbark vessel for water –can boil meet in it with hot stones– Takes a long time. Also a vessel of birch bark shaped like a pan both ornamented by scratching the bark, which is wrong side out –very neatly made. Valued our kettles much Did not know use of eye in axe. Put a string through it & wore it round neck –cut toes. Did not like gun killed one moose; scared all the rest. The squaw-heegun for cooking –a mere stick put through the game & stuck in the ground slanted over the fire –a spit– Can be eating one side while the other is doing. The ar-tu-e-se a stick –string & bunch of leaves, which they toss & catch on the point of the stick –make great use of it. Count with it– Make the clouds go off the sun with it Snow shoes of two kinds, one of same shape at both ends so that the mohawks could not tell which way they were going. (Put some rags in the heel-hole to make a toe-mark?) Log trap to catch many kinds of animals. side view Some for bears let the log fall 6 or 7 feet First there is a Frame then the little stick which the animal moves presses down as he goes through under the log. Then the crooke stick is hung over the top of the frame & holds up the log by a string the weight of the log on this keeps the little stick up. A drizzling & misty day this has been melting the snow. The mist divided into a thousand ghostly forms was blowing across Walden. Mr Emerson’s Cliff-hill seen from the RR through the mist looked like a dark heavy frowning N Hampshire Mt– I do not understand fully why hills look so much larger at such a time –unless being the most distant we see & in the horizon we suppose them farther off and so magnify them. I think there can be no looming about it.

7. If you asked an Antinomian how many legs a dog would have if you called its tail a leg, they would respond “Four — because calling a tail a leg doesn’t make it a leg.” HDT WHAT? INDEX

EMILY DICKINSON EMILY DICKINSON

1851

In this year Emily Dickinson turned 21. She wrote her brother Austin Dickinson, who was teaching at the Endicott School in Boston’s North End:

I like to get such facts to set down in my journal, also anything else that’s startling which you may chance to know — I don’t think deaths or murders can ever come amiss in a young woman’s journal.

In this year Henry Thoreau turned 26. He surveyed the lots adjacent to the site on which Concord was building a new courthouse, which was the location at which his father had worked in the “Yellow Store.” He also laid out the new courthouse’s cellar and, according to Adams and Ross, became a Romantic.

In 1993, Thoreau’s journal for this year would be separately published by Penguin:

There was a break in the singing family, between Jesse Hutchinson, Judson Hutchinson, and Asa Hutchinson. Various members of the family would form singing groups of their own. John W. Hutchinson would be the last of the brothers to form a regular singing company of his own and much of his energy would be put into singing on behalf of temperance. HDT WHAT? INDEX

EMILY DICKINSON EMILY DICKINSON June 8, Sunday: Emily Dickinson’s 1st letter to her brother Austin Dickinson, teaching at the Endicott School in Boston’s North End.

From this day until April 1, 1852, UNCLE TOM’S CABIN, OR THE MAN THAT WAS A THING was being published in 3 installments in a Washington DC antislavery weekly, The National Era. It is instructive to compare and contrast the “There is more day to dawn” trope from the last page in WALDEN, which would not be written until 1853-1854,

WALDEN: I do not say that John or Jonathan will realize all this; PEOPLE OF but such is the character of that morrow which mere lapse of time WALDEN can never make to dawn. The light which puts out our eyes is darkness to us. Only that day dawns to which we are awake. There is more day to dawn. The sun is but a morning star.

“JOHN” (BULL) “JONATHAN”

with the “another and better day is dawning” trope seen on the first page of this enormously popular book. In the case of Harriet Beecher Stowe, what was being offered was a day and era, new and improved but nevertheless “commensurable” with the present day and era. In the case of Henry Thoreau, what would be offered would be specifically the crossing of a boundary, specifically not of the same order or realm with any previous dawning. When light arrives which puts out our eyes, it is a different order of illumination, one which would seem presently as darkness to us. We note that what Stowe was offering in her book on freedom and fairness amounted to mere future-worship, a version of providentialism in theology and of consequentialism in ethics, a hopefulness which proceeded psychologically out of a present lack and longing and operated by way of the HDT WHAT? INDEX

EMILY DICKINSON EMILY DICKINSON pathos of ressentiment,8 whereas what Thoreau would be countering with would be a celebration of plenitude.

It is also interesting to compare the attitude taken toward the law, in Chapter IX of this novel, with the attitude published by Thoreau on May 14, 1849 in his “Resistance to Civil Government” contribution to Elizabeth Palmer Peabody’s AESTHETIC PAPERS, paragraph 18 “machinery of government” and “break the law,” where Senator John Bird of Ohio discusses, with Mrs. Bird, a law forbidding the giving of food or water to escaping slaves. The wife exclaims:

You ought to be ashamed, John! Poor, homeless, houseless creatures! It’s a shameful, wicked, abominable law, and I’ll break it, for one, the first time I get a chance; and I hope I shall have a chance, I do!

June 8, Sunday: In F.A. Michaux i.e. the younger Michaux’s Voyage A l’ouest des Monts Alléghanys –1802 printed at Paris 1808 He says the common inquiry in the newly settld west was “From what part of the world have you come? As if these vast and fertile regions would naturally be the point of union and the common country of all the inhabitants of the globe” The current of the Ohio is so swift in the spring that it is not necessary to row –indeed rowing would do more harm than good, since it would tend to turn to the ark out of the current onto to some isle or sand bar –where it would be entangled amid floating trees– This has determined the form of the bateux –which are not the best calculated for swiftness but to obey the current. They are from 15 to 50 feet long by 10 to 12 & 15 with square ends & a roof of boards like a house at one end– The sides are about 41/2 feet above the water “I was alone on the shore of the Monongahela, when I perceived, for the first time, in the distance, five or six of these bateaux which were descending this river. I could not conceive what those great square boxes were which abandoned to the current, presented alternately their ends, their sides, & even their angles As they came nearer I heard a confused noise but without distinguishing anything, on account of the elevation of the sides. It was only on ascending the bank of the river that I perceived, in these bateaux, many families carrying with them their horses, cows, poultry, dismounted carts, plows, harnesses, beds, agricultural implements, in short all that constitute the moveables of a household & the carrying on of a farm” But he was obliged to paddle his log canoe “sans cesse” because of the sluggishness of the current of the Ohio in April 1802 A Vermonter told him that the expense of clearing land in his state was always defrayed by the potash obtained from the ashes of the trees which were burnt –and sometimes people took land to clear on condition that they should have what potash they could make. 8. As proof of this, consider the verse of the hymn “Jerusalem, My Happy Home” that Harriet Beecher Stowe tacked into John Newton’s 1772 hymn “Amazing Grace”:

When we’ve been there ten thousand years, Bright shining as the sun; We’ve no less days to sing God’s praise Than when we first begun! HDT WHAT? INDEX

EMILY DICKINSON EMILY DICKINSON After travelling more than 3000 miles in North America –he says that no part is to be compared for the “force végétative des forêts” to the region of the Ohio between Wheeling & Marietta. 36 miles above the last place he measured a plane tree on the bank of the Ohio which at four feet from the ground was 47 in circ. It is true it was “renflé d’une manière prodigieuse” Tulip & plane trees his father had said attained the greatest diameter of N A Trees. Ginseng was then the only “territorial” production of Kentucky which would pay the expense of transportation by land to Philadelphia. They collected it from spring to the first frosts. Even hunters carried for this purpose, beside their guns, a bag & a little “pioche” From 25 to 30 “milliers pesant” were then transported annually & this commerce was on the increase. Some transported it themselves from Kentucky to China i.e. without selling it the merchants of the seaboard– Traders in Kentucky gave 20 to 24 “sous” the pound for it. They habituated their wild hogs to return to the house from time to time by distributing corn for them once or twice a week– So I read that in Buenos Ayres they collect the horses into the corral twice a week to keep them tame in a degree Gathered the first strawberries to day. Observed on Fair Haven a tall Pitch Pine, such as some call Yellow P– very smooth yellowish & destitute of branches to a great height. The outer & darker colored bark appeared to have scaled off leaving a fresh & smooth surface –at the ground all round the tree I saw what appeared to be the edges of the old surface scales extending to two inches more in thickness. The bark was divided into large smooth plates 1 to 2 feet long & 4 to 6 inches wide. I noticed that the cellular portion of the bark of the canoe birch log, from which I stripped the epidermis a week or two ago –was turned a complete brick red color very striking to behold –& reminding me of the red man – and all strong natural things –the color of our blood somewhat.– under the epidermis it was still a sort of buff The different colors of the various parts of this bark, at various times, fresh or stale are extremely agreeable to my eye I found the White Pine top full of staminate blossom buds not yet fully grown or expanded.– with a rich red tint like a tree full of fruit –but I could find no pistillate blossom– The fugacious petalled cistus –& the pink –& the lupines of various tints are seen together. Our outside garments which are often thin & fanciful & merely for show –are our epidermis –hanging loose & fantastic like that of the Yellow birch –which may be cast off without harm our thicker & more essential garments are our cellular integument when this is removed the tree is said to be girdled & dies– Our shirt is the liber or true bark. beneath which is found the alburnum or sap wood –while the heart in old stocks is commonly rotten or has disappeared. As if we grew like trees, and were of the exogenous kind.

[Version published in 1906: “Our outside garments, which are often thin and merely for show, are our epidermis, hanging loose and fantastic like that of the yellow birch, which may be cast off without harm, stripped off here and there without fatal injury; sometimes called cuticle and false skin. The vital principle wholly wanting in it; partakes not of the life of the plant. Our thicker and more essential garments are our cellular integument. This is removed, the tree is said to be girdled and dies. Our shirt is the cortex, liber, or true bark, beneath which is found the alburnum or sap-wood, while the heart in old stocks is commonly rotten or has disappeared. As if we grew like trees, and were of the exogenous kind.”

In 1852, in his 4th version of WALDEN, Thoreau would write: Usually, we don garment after garment as if we grew like exogenous plants by addition without. Our outside and often thin and fanciful clothes are our epidermis or false skin, which partakes not of the life of the plant, and may be stripped off here and there without fatal injury; our thicker garments, constantly worn, are our cellular integument, or cortex; our shirts are our liber or true bark, which cannot be removed without girdling and so destroying the man. I believe that all races at some seasons wear something equivalent to the last. It is desirable that a man be clad so simply that he can lay his hands on himself in the dark, and that he live in all respects so compactly & preparedly, that if an enemy take the city, he can, like the old philosopher, walk out the gate empty-handed without anxiety. While one thick garment is, for most purposes, as good as three thin ones, and cheap clothing can be obtained at prices really to suit customers; while a thick coat can be bought five dollars, which will last as many years, (for example, the one I have on), thick pantaloons for 2 dollars, cowhide boots for a dollar & a half a pair, a summer hat for a quarter of a dollar, and a winter cap for sixty-two & a half cents, or a better be made at home at a nominal cost, where is he so poor that, clad in such a suit of his own earning, there will not be found wise men to do him reverence? HDT WHAT? INDEX

EMILY DICKINSON EMILY DICKINSON

This eventually would appear in WALDEN:

WALDEN: We don garment after garment, as if we grew like exogenous plants by addition without. Our outside and often thin and fanciful clothes are our epidermis or false skin, which partakes not of our life, and may be stripped off here and there without fatal injury; our thicker garments, constantly worn, are our cellular integument, or cortex; but our shirts are our liber or true bark which cannot be removed without girdling and so destroying the man. I believe that all races at some seasons wear something equivalent to the shirt. It is desirable that a man be clad so simply that he can lay his hands on himself in the dark, and that he live in all respects so compactly and preparedly, that, if an enemy take the town, he can, like the old philosopher, walk out the gate empty-handed without anxiety. While one thick garment is, for most purposes, as good as three thin ones, and cheap clothing can be obtained at prices really to suit customers; while a thick coat can be bought for five dollars, which will last as many years, thick pantaloons for two dollars, cowhide boots for a dollar and a half a pair, a summer hat for a quarter of a dollar, and a winter cap for sixty-two and a half cents, or a better be made at home at a nominal cost, where is he so poor that, clad in such a suit, of his own earning, there will not be found wise men to do him reverence?

THE FALLACY OF MOMENTISM: THIS STARRY UNIVERSE DOES NOT CONSIST OF A SEQUENCE OF MOMENTS. THAT IS A FIGMENT, ONE WE HAVE RECOURSE TO IN ORDER TO PRIVILEGE TIME OVER CHANGE, APRIVILEGING THAT MAKES CHANGE SEEM UNREAL, DERIVATIVE, A MERE APPEARANCE. IN FACT IT IS CHANGE AND ONLY CHANGE WHICH WE EXPERIENCE AS REALITY, TIME BEING BY WAY OF RADICAL CONTRAST UNEXPERIENCED — A MERE INTELLECTUAL CONSTRUCT. THERE EXISTS NO SUCH THING AS A MOMENT. NO “INSTANT” HAS EVER FOR AN INSTANT EXISTED.

Emily Dickinson “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project HDT WHAT? INDEX

EMILY DICKINSON EMILY DICKINSON September: Emily Dickinson and her sister Lavinia Dickinson visited the home of their brother Austin Dickinson, who was teaching at the Endicott School in Boston’s North End. While there they consulted Dr. Wesselhoeft. Having an opportunity to tour Boston again as in the summer of 1846, Emily found that she didn’t “care a fig for the museums, the stillness, or Jenny Lind.” HDT WHAT? INDEX

EMILY DICKINSON EMILY DICKINSON

1852

February 20, Friday: Emily Dickinson’s valentine to William Howland was published in the Springfield, Massachusetts Republican.

Henry Thoreau was reading in Samuel Laing’s CHRONICLE OF THE KINGS OF NORWAY:

February 20, Friday: Erling had a son Thorer. It is said of the former that “both winter & summer it was the custom in his house to drink at the mid-day meal according to a measure, but at the night meal there was no measure in drinking.” Kings are not they who go abroad to conquer kingdoms but who stay at home & mind their business – proving first their ability to govern their families & themselves. “King Sigurd Syr was standing in his corn-field when the messengers came to him, – – He had many people on his farm. Some were then shearing corn, some bound it together, some drove it to the building, some unloaded it & put it in stack or barn; but the king and two men with him, went sometimes into the field, sometimes to the place where the corn was put into the barn”. – – he “attended carefully to his cattle & husbandry, and managed his housekeeping himself. He was nowise given to pomp and was rather taciturn. But he was a man of the best understanding in Norway,” – – After hearing the messengers he replied– “The news ye bring me is weighty, and ye bring it forward in great heat. Already before now Aasta has been taken up much with people who were not so near to her; and I see she is still of the same disposition. She takes this up with great warmth; but can she lead her son out of the business with the same splendor she is leading him into it?” Fate will go all lengths to aid her protegés When the Swedish king and Olaf king of Norway threw lots for the possession of a farm– “The Swedish king threw two sixes, and said King Olaf need scarcely throw. He replied, while shaking the dice in his hand, ‘Although there be two sixes on the dice, it would be easy sire, for God Almighty, to let them turn up in my favor.’ Then he threw, and had sixes also. Now the Swedish king threw again, and had again two sixes. Olaf king of Norway then threw, and had six upon one dice, and the other split in two, so as to make seven eyes in all upon it; and the farm was adjudged to the king of Norway.” There was a Thorer Sel who “was a man of low birth, but had swung himself up in the world as an active man”. There was a Northman named “Rane Thin-nose.” There is a long story about Thorer Hund’s expedition to Biarmeland. “Ludr –the lure–” says Laing in note, “is a long tube or roll of birch-bark used as a horn by the herdboys in the mts of Norway.” There was a “Thorer the Low” There was a giant of a man named Gauka-Thorer and his brother who joined King Olafs army. The king inquired if they were Christians. “Gauka-Thorer replies, that he is neither christian nor heathen. I and my comrades have no faith but on ourselves, our strength, and the luck of victory; and with this faith we slip through sufficiently well.” “The king replies. ‘A great pity it is that such brave slaughtering fellows do not believe in Christ their Creator’.” “Thorer replies, ‘Is there any Christian man, king, in thy following, who stands so high in the air as we two brothers?’” In King Olaf’s last battle he “hewed at Thorer Hund, and struck him across the shoulders; but the sword would not cut, and it was as if dust flew from his reindeer-skin coat.” There are some verses about it. But Thorer having had a hand in the death of the king left the country. “He went all the way to Jerusalem, and many people say he never came back.” Poeta nascitur non fit, but under what conditions is the poet born?– Perchance there is such a thing as a perpetual propagation or reproduction of the human without any recreation – as all botanists assert respecting plants and as Meyer in particular concerning lichens who says that the “pulverulent matter of Lichens is that which is subject to this kind of indefinite propagation, while the sporules lying in the shields are the only part that will really multiply the species.” Every gardiner practices budding & grafting but only Van Mons and his equals cultivate seedlings & produce new & valuable varieties. The genius is a seedling – often precocious or made to bear fruit early – as Van Mons treated his pears– The common man is the Baldwin – propagated by mere offshoots or repetitions of the parent stock. At least if all men are to be regarded as seedlings the greater part are exceedingly like the parent stock. The slope from the last generation to this seems steeper than any part of history. I hear with surprise this afternoon that the ox wagon was rarely seen 50 years ago – they used the ox-cart here almost exclusively then – even to team wood to Boston. The law requires wood to be four feet long from the middle of the carf to the mid. of the carf yet the honest deacon & farmer directs his hired men to cut his wood “4 feet a little scant.” He does it as naturally as he HDT WHAT? INDEX

EMILY DICKINSON EMILY DICKINSON breathes. We love to see nature clad whether in earth or a human body. Nobody likes to set his his house under that part of the hill where the sod is broken & the sand is flowing.

Pm to Flints Pond: The last 2 or 3 days have been among the coldest in the winter though not so cold as a few weeks ago. I notice in the low ground covered with bushes near Flint’s Pond – many little rabbit paths in the snow – where they have travelled in each others tracks or many times back & forth – 6 inches wide. This too is probably their summer habit. The rock by the pond is remarkable for its umbilicaria? I saw a mole? run along under the bank by the edge of the pond – but it was only by watching long & sharply that I glimpsed him now & then.– he ran so close to the ground & under rather than over anything – as roots & beds of leaves & twigs.– and yet without making any noise. No wonder that we so rarely see these animals though their tracks are so common– I have been astonished to observe before after holding them in my hand how quickly they will bury themselves–& glide along just beneath the surface whatever it may be composed of –grass or leaves or twigs –or earth –or snow. So some men are sly and subterranean in their ways & skulk – though often they raise a mound of earth or snow above their backs which betrays rather than conceals them. For privacy they prefer to travel in a gallery like the mole though it sometimes happens that it is arched above the ground when they think themselves deep in the sod. The mole goes behind & beneath, rather than before & above.

December 13, Monday: Edward Dickinson was elected to represent Hampshire County in the US House of Representatives.

After breaking her hip in a fall, Fanny Wright died in Cincinnati, Ohio. The West was hospitable to every new creed or social experiment, while its practical necessities furnished the severest test of values. One after another the pilgrims had come, — French colonists of the Scioto and the Miami when the nation was founded; George Rapp, the shoemaker of Württemberg, with his company of “Harmonists”; Robert Owen and his New Harmonists in 1823; and Fanny Wright (1825), who colonized free negroes on two thousand acres in Tennessee to prove them capable of civilization. The only experiment that failed through persecution was that of Fanny Wright to help the victim race. The others failed by reason of the actual conditions of the West. But remnants of all of them had found some nest in Cincinnati.... I there read for the first time Fanny Wright’s book, A FEW DAYS IN A THENS, and some of the addresses which charmed large audiences in Cincinnati. Many a time have I joined in the pilgrimage to HDT WHAT? INDEX

EMILY DICKINSON EMILY DICKINSON her tomb in the cemetery near Cincinnati. AUTOBIOGRAPHY VOLUME II

Henry Thoreau completed a survey alongside Flint’s Pond for Daniel Weston, that he had begun on the 10th.

View Henry Thoreau’s personal working drafts of his surveys courtesy of AT&T and the Concord Free Public Library: http://www.concordlibrary.org/scollect/Thoreau_Surveys/Thoreau_Surveys.htm

(The official copy of this survey of course had become the property of the person or persons who had hired this Concord town surveyor to do their surveying work during the 19th Century. Such materials have yet to be recovered.)

View this particular personal working draft of a survey in fine detail: http://www.concordlibrary.org/scollect/Thoreau_Surveys/137.htm HDT WHAT? INDEX

EMILY DICKINSON EMILY DICKINSON

1853

March: Emily Dickinson assisted in a clandestine correspondence between her brother Austin Dickinson and Susan Gilbert (eventually she would be helping this younger brother to cheat on his wife Susan Gilbert Dickinson with the much younger Mrs. Mabel Loomis Todd, offering to the couple the use of a couch in her dining room upon which they could indulge their adulterous passions long term to their hearts’ content).

July: The Reverend Edward Strong Dwight (1820-1890) began his pastorate in Amherst, Massachusetts.

Nathaniel Hawthorne and family moved from Concord to Liverpool. In England, Nathaniel will find himself offended by the blank regularity of the typical English lawn, which had been created by a device known as the “lawnmower” that had been much in use there since it was patented in 1830.

The Reverend Samuel Ringgold Ward went on a lecture tour in England: As I was under no engagement to labour for the Committee on Sunday, I accepted of an offer kindly made me by the Committee of the Colonial Missionary Society, through its excellent Secretary, Rev. Thomas James, to urge the claims of that very important charity, on the first day of the week. Thus the field of my labours and circle of my acquaintance were enlarged greatly; and as my appearance anywhere, as I understood the matter, brought the slave to mind, I hope that, in that service, I did not mar the great chief object of my coming hither. Occasionally, too, I was honoured by invitations to speak for the London Missionary Society; while kindred charities, along with these, seemed to regard me as public property; and, ere I knew it, I had the name of a respectable successful beggar. The duty of travelling in these causes called me into almost every county in England, into the pulpits of the most distinguished Dissenting divines in the land, into company with some of England’s noblest sons and daughters, into contact with representatives of the different classes of pro-slavery men in England, whether exotics or natives — in a word, into a sphere of active usefulness which I had before never dared to covet. It is, as it should be, in America and in the colonies, regarded as a matter of importance, for a man wishing to improve both his head and his heart, to visit England. There is so much to be learned here, civilization being at its very summit — society, in consequence, presenting every attraction, and every form of social improvement and instruction. Here, too, is so much of historic recollection. England, indeed, is a book, ancient, HDT WHAT? INDEX

EMILY DICKINSON EMILY DICKINSON mediæval, and modern, in itself. One cannot but agree with those who hold the opinion that the best specimens of the Colonial or the American gentleman need European travel for their finishing. English travel, in more ways than one, is the best, choicest portion of European travel. I came to England knowing this, and hoping to enjoy and appreciate it in some degree; but to be associated with that band who have no equals in this world and no superiors in any age, the leaders of the benevolent schemes of England — to be acknowledged by them as a coadjutor — to be permitted to share with them in those smaller, lighter portions of their work, for which alone I had any sort of even seeming qualifications — was what I had no right to expect, but what I felt the honour of all the more. Before I had been one month in England, I had been upon the platforms of the Bible, Tract, Sunday School, Missionary, Temperance, and Peace, as well as the Anti-Slavery, Societies. To the last, in my native country, Negroes are freely admitted, invited, as a matter of course. Who ever saw one of sable hue upon the platforms of the others? Never, as an equal brother man, was I welcomed to the national platforms of any of them, until I became a resident of Canada.

Russia occupied the Danubian provinces of Turkey, following the orders of Czar Nicholas I, and hostilities between the two countries escalated. By November the two countries would be officially at war. HDT WHAT? INDEX

EMILY DICKINSON EMILY DICKINSON September:In Boston, Ticknor, Reed, and Fields published Nathaniel Hawthorne’s TANGLEWOOD TALES, FOR GIRLS AND BOYS; BEING A SECOND WONDER-BOOK.

Emily Dickinson and her sister Lavinia Dickinson visited Josiah Gilbert Holland and Elizabeth Luna Chapin Holland in Springfield, Massachusetts. HDT WHAT? INDEX

EMILY DICKINSON EMILY DICKINSON

1854

January 13, Friday: Incidental music to Romulus, a comédie by Dumas, Feuillet and Bocage, by Jacques Offenbach was performed for the initial time, at the Comédie-Française.

It was a warm and thawing day, and Henry Thoreau walked to Walden Pond and the Goose Ponds, and Britton’s Camp.

Emily Dickinson wrote to B.F. Newton’s last pastor, the Reverend Edward Everett Hale.

Anthony Foss obtained a patent for the accordion. (Might this Anthony Foss be related to Andrew Twombly Foss of New Hampshire?)

April: Ralph Emerson resigned his professorship at the Andover Theological Seminary and relocated to Newburyport, Massachusetts.

The Dickinsons visited Washington DC while Emily Dickinson remained at home in Amherst with Susan Gilbert and John Graves. HDT WHAT? INDEX

EMILY DICKINSON EMILY DICKINSON September 19, Tuesday: On this day and the following one, Emily Dickinson and her sister Lavinia again visited Josiah Gilbert Holland and Elizabeth Holland in Springfield, Massachusetts.

In the afternoon Henry Thoreau went to Conantum (Gleason J6). That day he mused on the writing of his new lecture “What Shall It Profit?”:

Thinking this afternoon of the prospect of my writing lectures and going abroad to read them the next winter, I realized how incomparably great the advantages of obscurity and poverty which I have enjoyed so long (and may still perhaps enjoy). I thought with what more than princely, with what poetical, leisure I had spent my years hitherto, without care or engagement, fancy-free... Ah, how I have thriven on solitude and poverty! I cannot overstate this advantage. I do not see how I could have enjoyed it, if the public

Thoreau completed his searching through the journal for passages about walking in the moonlight, and accepted Marston Watson’s invitation to deliver a lecture to “a small and private audience of friends” in Plymouth, Massachusetts on October 1st (scheduling difficulties caused postponement). The full title of the lecture he would deliver in Plymouth on October 8th would be “Moonlight (Introductory to an Intended Course of Lectures)” (this is part of a pencil jotting at the top of what is apparently the first leaf of Thoreau’s working draft of the lecture, preserved at Middlebury College in Vermont, evidently a part he did not read to his audience).

Thoreau wrote to Benjamin Marston Watson, accepting his invitation from to deliver on October 1st a lecture to “a small and private audience of friends” in Plymouth. Concord Mass Sep 19th ’54 Dear Sir I am glad to hear from you & the Plymouth men again. The world still holds together between Concord and Plymouth, it seems. I should like to be with you while Mr Alcott is there, but I cannot come next Sunday. I will come Sunday after next, that is Oct 1st, if that will do, – and look out for you at the Depot. I do not like to promise now more than one discourse. Is there a good precedent for 2? Yrs Concordially Henry D. Thoreau. HDT WHAT? INDEX

EMILY DICKINSON EMILY DICKINSON

That evening, in Plymouth, Bronson Alcott read from a criticism of A WEEK ON THE CONCORD AND MERRIMACK RIVERS that he had entered in his journal of 1847, and read other passages of his diary from the family’s “Hillside” period in Concord.

Sept. 19. Tuesday. P.M. — To Conantum. Viburnum Lentago berries now perhaps in prime, though there are but few blue ones. Thinking this afternoon of the prospect of my writing lectures and going abroad to read them the next winter, I realized how incomparably great the advantages of obscurity and poverty which I have enjoyed so long (and may still perhaps enjoy). I thought with what more than princely, with what poetical, leisure I had spent my years hitherto, without care or engagement, fancy-free. I have given myself up to nature, I have lived so many springs and summers and autumns and winters as if I had nothing else to do but live them, and imbibe whatever nutriment they had for me; I have spent a couple of years, for instance, with the flowers chiefly, having none other so binding engagement as to observe when they opened; I could have afforded to spend a whole fall observing the changing tints of the foliage. Ah, how I have thriven on solitude and poverty! I cannot overstate this advantage. I (to not see how I could have enjoyed it, if the public had been expecting as much of me as there is danger now that they will. If I go abroad lecturing, how shall I ever recover the lost winter? It has been my vacation, my season of growth and expansion, a prolonged youth. An upland plover goes off from Conantum top (though with a white belly), uttering a sharp white, tu white. That drought was so severe that a few trees here and there –birch, maple, chestnut, apple, oak– have lost nearly all their leaves. I see large flocks of robins with a few flickers, the former keeping up their familiar peeping mid chirping. Many pignuts have fallen. Hardhack is very commonly putting forth new leaves where it has lost the old. They are half in inch or three quarters long, and green the stems well. The stone-crop fruit has for a week or more had a purplish or pinkish (?) tinge by the roadside. Fallen acorns in a few days acquire that wholesome shining dark chestnut (?) color. Did I see a returned yellow redpoll fly by? I saw, some nights ago, a great deal of light reflected from a fog-bank over the river upon Monroe’s white fence, malting it conspicuous almost as by moonlight from my window. Scarlet oak acorn (commonly a broader cup with more shelf). [Vide another figure in fall of ’58.]

November 13, Monday: George Whitefield Chadwick was born in Lowell, Massachusetts, the youngest of 2 children born to Alonzo Calvin Chadwick, a carpenter in the Massachusetts Mills, with Hannah Godrey Fitts who came from a family of musicians (the mother would die within a week, of puerperal fever).

Edward Dickinson was defeated in his bid to retain his seat representing Hampshire County in the US House of Representatives.

In England, Nathaniel Hawthorne was confiding to Monckton Milnes, asking that he not be quoted, that although WALDEN; OR, LIFE IN THE WOODS and A WEEK ON THE CONCORD AND MERRIMACK RIVERS were by “a very remarkable man,” he hardly hoped that Milnes would read the books, “unless for the observation of nature in them which is wonderfully accurate.” Hawthorne’s evaluation was that these, like other American books, did not carry the reader away, requiring some effort –and not by a man of weak resolution– to read through to the end. TIMELINE OF WALDEN TIMELINE OF A WEEK HDT WHAT? INDEX

EMILY DICKINSON EMILY DICKINSON This is frequently controverted — but some allege that Mr. Henry D. Thoreau was a guest on a mid-19th- Century television talk show. Here is the surviving transcript evidence: [AB=Ainsworth Brown; HT=Henry Thoreau] AB: Good afternoon. This is “The Ainsworth Brown Show” and I am Ainsworth Brown. We are privileged to have as our guest this afternoon Henry David Thoreau who has written a book, WALDEN; OR, LIFE IN THE WOODS. Henry, come on out .... [Applause from studio audience as Thoreau enters] Welcome, welcome. Glad you could come.... Have a seat.... HT: Thank you. AB: Henry, I have not had a chance to read your book yet but I do know that it is, in the popular parlance, “hot, hot, hot.” Graham’s Magazine has called it “always racy and stimulating,” the product of a “powerful and accomplished mind”.... So what’s this WALDEN about? HT: It’s the story of the two years, two months, and two days I spent living alone in a cabin by Walden Pond, near Concord, Massachusetts. AB: What happened? HT: I built the cabin. That first summer I grew some beans as a cash crop. In the book I talk about the food I ate, the plants and animals I saw, and the changing of the seasons. AB: So what did you eat? HT: I ate wild berries and grapes. I occasionally caught some fish or a wild animal –I once trapped and butchered a woodchuck who was bothering my bean plants– but mostly I ate rice, bread made from rye and cornmeal with molasses as sweetening, potatoes, and peas. AB: Frankly, Henry, except for the woodchuck, it sounds pretty boring. HT: I can see why you might think so, Mr. Brown. But, as I contend in the book, the external circumstances in which one finds one’s self are far less important than one’s inner life. I wanted to simplify my material needs to a point where I could spend just a few hours each day satisfying them and have all the rest of my time free for contemplation and self-improvement. Most men are slaves to their possessions and to the jobs they are forced to perform in order to pay for them. AB: I get it — a Marxist/capitalist kind of thing.... HT: I’m not sure I know what you mean.... AB: What were the results of your contemplations? HT: I have recorded many of my thoughts in the book, but I don’t really think of contemplation as a means for book-creation, or as a means to anything at all, but rather as an end in itself. AB: I see ... so it’s like meditation, TM, that kind of thing.... HT: Yes, it is meditation. AB: But you would meditate for like —what —ten hours a day? HT: Yes, it might frequently have been that long. HDT WHAT? INDEX

EMILY DICKINSON EMILY DICKINSON AB: Wow! ... Did you spend all your time at the pond or did you go other places too? HT: I have always walked wherever I’ve wanted to. Individual men may think they own particular pieces of property but, in a truer sense, trees, mountains and animals can not be owned; they belong to Nature and to the men who would love and protect them. AB: [Turning to the camera] So, there you have it. Henry David Thoreau, Marxist eco-warrior. He has regularly spent ten hours a day in meditation and once killed, butchered with his own hands, and ate a woodchuck who was devouring his bean plants. His book [holding a copy up to the camera] is WALDEN; OR, LIFE IN THE W OODS. Thank you, Henry. Please tune in tomorrow when my guest will be... HDT WHAT? INDEX

EMILY DICKINSON EMILY DICKINSON

1855

After a number of “removal” years spent in a clapboard on North Pleasant Street, the Dickinson family, prospering again due to the father’s law practice, was able to repurchase their “The Mansion” home at 280 Main Street in Amherst MA which they had previously been forced to sell to clear debts. (They would not add, however, until later, the glass conservatory and the fancy white cupola.) Miss Emily Dickinson fell in love with the Reverend Charles Wadsworth of Philadelphia. HDT WHAT? INDEX

EMILY DICKINSON EMILY DICKINSON January: Edward Dickinson returned to Washington DC to complete the last session of the 33d US Congress, and his family followed him there.

James Russell Lowell offered a course of lectures at The Lowell Institute. The lectures proved so popular they

were repeated, and members of the Harvard College Board of Overseers were so overwhelmed by this popular triumph that they determined to sponsor him as the college’s replacement for Professor Longfellow. The deal they would seek to cut would be that first their selected inside-track guy would get to spend a year or two vacationing in Europe and boning up on his foreign languages and literatures, and then he would only be required to offer his students two lecture courses per year over and above such casual meetings in his study with small groups of advanced students as he chose to arrange. Of this arrangement, Henry Adams, class of 1858, would later report:

Lowell had brought back from Germany the only new and valuable part of its universities, the habit of allowing students to read with him privately in his study. Adams asked the privilege, and used it to read a little, and to talk a great deal, for the personal contact pleased and flattered him, as that of older men ought to flatter and please the young even when they altogether exaggerate its value. Lowell was a new element in the boy’s life. HDT WHAT? INDEX

EMILY DICKINSON EMILY DICKINSON February: Anthony Burns had been kept in the traders’ jail in Richmond, Virginia until he had been sold to a white man from North Carolina, and in this month this man retailed him to a Massachusetts minister at Barnum’s Hotel in Baltimore for the sum of $1,325.00. (Carefully, discretely, by way of an acceptable mediary, the black community of Boston was purchasing Burns’s freedom.) On March 7, 1855 a slave would be feted at Tremont Temple and handed his manumission papers. The former slave free at last would attend the School of Divinity at Oberlin College and become a minister of the gospel, God bless him.

A steam fire-engine from Cincinnati, built by the A.B. Latta Company, was exhibited in New York’s City Hall Park. An local fire company, using hand-engine No. 42, competed with the steamer. No. 42 slightly outperformed the Ohio machine but exhausted its operators.

Emily Dickinson and her sister Lavinia Dickinson sojourned in Washington DC.

March: Caleb G. Forshey relocated to Galveston, Texas and founded a “Texas Military Institute.”

Emily Dickinson and her sister Lavinia Dickinson visited a friend in Philadelphia on their way home from Washington DC to Amherst MA. Miss Emily fell in love with the Reverend Charles Wadsworth. HDT WHAT? INDEX

EMILY DICKINSON EMILY DICKINSON April: After a number of “removal” years spent in a clapboard on North Pleasant Street, the Dickinsons were able to repurchase their “The Mansion” home at 280 Main Street in Amherst, Massachusetts, from Samuel Mack.

Waldo Emerson received a note from Professor Louis Agassiz:

It will give me great pleasure to have your daughter attend my school and I feel proud in the confidence you place in me in trusting to my care ... one who must be so dear to you. I trust this circumstance may lead to a personal acquaintance between us which I regret has not been brought about before.

Harvard College’s racist biologist during that era, and his wife, had set up their home in Cambridge as a racially and sexually segregated school, in order to educate Ellen Emerson and Louisa May Alcott among other toney white girls. We have, in the introduction to the character known as Professor Bhaer in LITTLE WOMEN, OR, MEG, JO, BETH AND AMY, an impression of the author’s regard for her stocky Cambridge professor:

I was thanking my stars that I’d learned to make nice buttonholes, when the parlor door opened and shut, and some one began to hum, — “Kennst du das Land,”

like a big bumblebee. It was dreadfully improper, I know, but I couldn’t resist the temptation, and lifting one end of the curtain before the glass door, I peeped in. Professor Bhaer was there, and while he arranged his books, I took a good look at him. A regular German — rather stout, with brown hair tumbled all over his head, a bushy beard, good nose, the kindest eyes I ever saw, and a splendid big voice that does one’s ears good, after our sharp or slipshod American gabble. His clothes were rusty, his hands were large, and he hadn’t a really handsome feature in his face, except his beautiful teeth, yet I liked him, for he had a fine head, his linen was very nice, and he looked like a gentleman, though two buttons were off his coat and there was a patch on one shoe. He looked sober in spite of his humming, till he went to the window to turn the hyacinth bulbs toward the sun, and stroke the cat, who received him like an old friend. Then he smiled, and when a tap came at the door, called out in a loud, brisk tone, — “Herein!” HDT WHAT? INDEX

EMILY DICKINSON EMILY DICKINSON November: The Dickinsons moved back into their home at 280 Main Street. Soon Emily’s brother Austin Dickinson would begin construction of his home “The Evergreens” at 214 Main Street, which would be connected with Emily Dickinson’s home by a board fence and a 300-foot path.

Louisa Whitman, Walt’s mother, sold the house she had purchased in May at 99 Ryerson Street on the outskirts of Brooklyn, where the family had lived while Walt Whitman, unemployed, had been putting the finishing touches to the first edition of LEAVES OF GRASS.

During this month and the following one, some 2,000 pro-slavery men, self-proclaimed “Border Ruffians,” would come to camp around the fledgling town of Lawrence on the Wakarusa River (really a creek) in the Kansas Territory. After an anti-slavery man had been gunned down while attempting to cross the sentry line of the Border Ruffians, several Free State women, Mrs. Lois Brown (helpmate of the editor of the Kansas Herald of Freedom) and Mrs. Margaret Wood (helpmate of an organizer of anti-slavery immigration) would conceal sacks of gunpowder under the fronts and bustles of their dresses, and insert bars of lead into their stockings, and –pretending to be heavily gravid– ride in wagons into the town in order to arm its defenders. This was the so-called Wakarusa War, which some regard as the 1st military engagement of the Civil War. The engagement would end when the governor of the territory formally recognized the militia that was being organized by the Free State settlers. THE 2D GREAT AMERICAN DISUNION HDT WHAT? INDEX

EMILY DICKINSON EMILY DICKINSON

1856

October: Emily Dickinson’s rye bread was awarded a 2d prize at the annual Amherst cattle show.

The Texas Military Institute founded by Caleb G. Forshey at Galveston, Texas in the previous year was relocated to Rutersville in Fayette County six miles from La Grange and combined with two other similar institutions to function as the Texas Monumental and Military Institute (until 1861). The physical plant included the former Rutersville College buildings on a 10-acre campus and several single-story barracks. Initially there would be 58 cadets. Mr. Forshey would be superintendent of the institute and its teacher of grammar and literature. Bolivar Timmons, a graduate of the Kentucky Military Institute, would be its commandant and its teacher of mathematics. Louis Wüllrich of Göttingen, Germany, would teach languages, music, and gymnastics. Major William Thornton would be an assistant professor; Captain W.H. Russell of the Texas Navy would be steward, and Mrs. Fanny Russell would be stewardess. In this same timeframe Forshey, although he would oppose secession, was made a Major of Engineers in the Confederate forces, assigned to defend the Texas coastline (by the end of the civil war he would be impoverished). HDT WHAT? INDEX

EMILY DICKINSON EMILY DICKINSON

1857

August: Friend Bernard Barton’s daughter Lucy Barton and her husband of 9 months, Edward J. Fitzgerald, separated.

Emily Dickinson was part of a judging committee, for rye bread and Indian bread, at the annual cattle show.

December 16, Wednesday: Waldo Emerson lectured in Amherst, Massachusetts and visited the Austin Dickinsons.

In our nation’s puzzle palace, somebody had a decent idea: District of Columbia, County of Washington} to wit On this 16th day of December A.D. 1857 personally appeared before the subscriber a Justice of the Peace in and for the County aforesaid Nicholas Snyder and made oath in due form of law and saith that he knows a certain colored girl of light complexion named Dilialy Ann Payne of the County of Washington D.C. for the time of about eighteen years and knows further that the same was born free and that nobody has any claim against her freedom, to the best of his knowledge & belief. Given under my hand & seal this sixteenth day of December A.D. 1857. Chas. Walters, J.P. DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA FREE PAPERS

December 16, Wednesday: Begins to snow about 8 A.M., and in fifteen minutes the ground is white, but it soon stops. Plowed grounds show white first. HDT WHAT? INDEX

EMILY DICKINSON EMILY DICKINSON

1858

Emily Dickinson encountered an unspecified inner crisis and began her great outpouring of verse, that would continue until 1865.

Mrs. Frances (Fanny) Matilda Vandegrift (or Van de Grift) Osborne gave birth to Isobel “Belle” Osbourne in Indianapolis, Indiana.

THE FUTURE CAN BE EASILY PREDICTED IN RETROSPECT

Spring: The earliest still-extant draft of Emily Dickinson’s letters to “Master.”

Because the “atmosphere in Texas has a remarkable transparency, particularly after ‘northers’ ... the skies seem to be nearer to them in Texas than in any other part of the world.... observations in Texas are very satisfactory,”9 Caleb G. Forshey was able to make detailed observations of a band of light extending across the night sky along the ecliptic, passing through all the familiar zodiacal constellations, the boundaries of which he traced onto star charts.10 ASTRONOMY

Emily Dickinson “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project

9. Forshey’s account would be included in George Jones’s “Recent Observations, by Various Persons, on the Gegenschein, or Completed Arch of the Zodiacal Light” in Proceedings of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, XIII (1860), 172-181. 10. The zodiacal light, the zodiacal band, and the gegenschein (a brightening in the zodiacal band at the point exactly opposite the Sun) are caused by sunlight reflecting from interplanetary dust particles orbiting the Sun near the ecliptic plane (the plane of the Earth’s orbit around the Sun). HDT WHAT? INDEX

EMILY DICKINSON EMILY DICKINSON

1859

Emily Dickinson began to prepare systematic file copies of all verses she considered to be satisfactory. Possibly she posed for a Daguerreotype with her arm around Catherine (Kate) Scott Turner Anthon at the studio of J.C. Spooner in Springfield (the image in question has been discovered in a private home in western Massachusetts in 1995 and the attribution remains hypothetical). ANALYZING THE PHOTO

In this year she composed “Success”: Success is counted sweetest By those who ne’er succeed. To comprehend a nectar Requires sorest need. Not one of all the Purple Host Who took the Flag today Can tell the definition So clear of Victory As he defeated — dying — On whose forbidden ear The distant strains of triumph Burst agonized and clear! HDT WHAT? INDEX

EMILY DICKINSON EMILY DICKINSON

1860

Helen Fiske (Hunt) (Jackson) met Emily Dickinson again.

HELEN HUNT JACKSON

March: Richard Realf joined the celibate Shaker community in Union Village, Ohio, becoming their public orator and demonstrating an ability to attract large crowds with a message of reform and abolitionism. He would try his hand, for a brief period, at being a perfectionist millenarian able to restrain himself from all carnal pleasures (the settlement had been for some time losing members of working age — and this flamboyant womanizing poet would be yet another of their losses).

It was probably during this month that the Dickinson home in Amherst, Massachusetts was visited by the Reverend Charles Wadsworth of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

Franklin Benjamin Sanborn fled to Canada.

To the dismay of the selectmen a spring festival sprang spontaneously to life at Sanborn’s school in Concord (I don’t know whether this occurred before or after his flight). Louisa May Alcott would report: Emerson spoke, and my song was sung. My song had a verse in it about John Brown, Wendell Phillips, and company, and some of the old fogies thought it better left out. But Mr. Emerson said, No, no, that is the best. It must be sung, and not only sung but read. He then read it right out loud, to my great surprise and pride. The narrow-minded of Concord will never dare say a word against it now. It was a lovely occasion, and has stirred up the stupid town immensely.

September 2, Sunday: Due to the ill health of his wife, the Reverend E.S. Dwight left the First Church of Amherst, Massachusetts and moved to Maine.

September 2: P.M.– To Annursnack. Solidago nemoralis apparently in prime, and S. stricta. The former covers A. Hosmer’s secluded turtle field near HDT WHAT? INDEX

EMILY DICKINSON EMILY DICKINSON the bridge, together with johnswort, now merely lingering.

September 12, Wednesday: Edward Dickinson was nominated to be Lieutenant Governor of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts (he would late decline this nomination).

In this timeframe Emily Dickinson had “a terror —since September— I could tell to none.”

September 12: Very heavy rain to-day (equinoctial), raising the river suddenly. I have said, within a week, that the river would rise this fall because it did not at all in the spring, and now it rises. A very dark and stormy night (after it); shops but half open. Where the fence is not painted white I can see nothing, and go whistling for fear I run against some one, though there is little danger that any one will be out. I come against a stone post and bruise my knees; then stumble over a bridge,– being in the gutter. You walk with your hands out to feel the fences and trees. There is no vehicle in the street to-night. The thermometer at 4 P.M. was 54. There was pretty high wind in the night.

October: Emily Dickinson and her sister Lavinia Dickinson visited the Colemans of Middletown, Connecticut.

Until early May of the following year, Henry Thoreau would be working on both his manuscript for WILD FRUITS and his manuscript for THE DISPERSION OF SEEDS.

FAITH IN A SEED: So with the fruit of the burdock, with which children are wont to build houses and barns without any mortar: both men and animals, apparently such as have shaggy coats, are employed in transporting them. I have even relieved a cat with a large mass of them which she could not get rid of, and I frequently see a cow with a bunch in the end of her whisking tail, with which, CAT perhaps, she stings herself in her vain efforts to brush off imagined flies. HDT WHAT? INDEX

EMILY DICKINSON EMILY DICKINSON

1861

May 4, Saturday: Emily Dickinson’s “The May-Wine” appeared in the Springfield, Massachusetts Republican.

Horace Mann, Jr. brought to Henry Thoreau a couple of small peewees, which Thoreau described as “not yellowish about eye and bill, and bill is also black.”

May 4. H. Mann brings me two small pewees, but not yellowish about eye and bill, and bill is all black. Also a white-throat sparrow, Wilson's thrush, and myrtlebird. HDT WHAT? INDEX

EMILY DICKINSON EMILY DICKINSON

1862

The Reverend Charles Wadsworth of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania departed for San Francisco by way of Cape Horn, without Miss Emily Dickinson in the bunk in his cabin.

February: The Atlantic Monthly published an article by the Reverend Thomas Wentworth Higginson, “Letter to a Young Contributor,” which invited unpublished writings and which would on April 15th provoke a letter of inquiry from a young lady in a neighboring town:

Mr. Higginson. Are you too deeply occupied to say if my verse is alive? The mind is so near itself –it cannot see, distinctly– and I have none to ask— Should you think it breathed — and had you the leisure to tell me, I should feel quick gratitude— If I make the mistake –that you dared to tell me– would you give me sincerer honor –toward you– I enclose my name –asking you, if you please –Sir– to tell me what is true? That you will not betray me –it is needless to ask– since Honor is its own pawn—

The letter writer disclosed that her name was “Miss Emily Dickinson.” HDT WHAT? INDEX

EMILY DICKINSON EMILY DICKINSON March 1, Saturday: Emily Dickinson’s “The Sleeping” appeared in the Springfield, Massachusetts Republican. A long, long sleep, a famous sleep That makes no show for dawn By stretch of limb or stir of lid,— An independent one. Was ever idleness like this? Within a hut of stone To bask the centuries away Nor once look up for noon?

A letter to Ticknor & Fields from Henry Thoreau conveyed one scarlet oak Quercus coccinea leaf, for them to HDT WHAT? INDEX

EMILY DICKINSON EMILY DICKINSON use for the basis of an illustration in their printing of “AUTUMNAL TINTS”:

Concord March 1st 1862. Messrs Ticknor & Fields, This Scarlet Oak leaf is the smallest one in my collection, yet it must lose a bristle or two to gain admittance to your page. I wish simply for a faithful outline engraving of the leaf bristles & all. In the middle of page 57 or of a neighboring page, is a note in HDT WHAT? INDEX

EMILY DICKINSON EMILY DICKINSON pencil— The leaf should be opposite to this page & this note be altered into a note for the bottom of the page like this — viz “The original of the leaf on the opposite page was picked from such a pile” Yours truly Henry D Thoreau, by S.E. Thoreau.

April 5, Saturday: The Dickinson family of Amherst, Massachusetts was visited by Samuel Bowles, who was on his way to sail for Europe on April 9th. EMILY DICKINSON

A performance of Arthur Sullivan’s incidental music to The Tempest at the Crystal Palace wins universal approval and catapults Sullivan into the public consciousness. “It was no exaggeration to say that I woke up the next morning and found myself famous.”

From April 5th to May 4th there would be fighting at Yorktown. US CIVIL WAR HDT WHAT? INDEX

EMILY DICKINSON EMILY DICKINSON April 15, Tuesday: Emily Dickinson wrote the first of her letters to the Reverend Thomas Wentworth Higginson after a reading of his essay “Letter to a Young Contributor” in the February issue of The Atlantic Monthly.

(At some point during this year, Emily responded to a now-lost letter from the Reverend: “You speak of Mr. Whitman — I never read his book — but was told he was disgraceful.”) The Confederate forces were expelled from Arizona by Union troops under Colonel James Henry Carleton. HDT WHAT? INDEX

EMILY DICKINSON EMILY DICKINSON

1863

September: Emily Dickinson “was ill since September.”

Ezra Heywood’s writings on the “War method of Peace” appeared in the LIBERATOR. He was one nonresistant who would never be seduced by the war fever. US CIVIL WAR HDT WHAT? INDEX

EMILY DICKINSON EMILY DICKINSON

1864

Emily Dickinson resided at a boardinghouse in Cambridgeport, Massachusetts while undergoing eye treatments in Boston.

February: Emily Dickinson went to Boston to have her eyes examined by Doctor Henry Willard Williams.

Captain Daniel Foster of the 37th Regiment of US Colored Troops wrote a letter home to his wife Dora. February 7, 1864 near Norfolk, Virginia My Dear Wife, I received your letter of February 5 today, and I was made very happy through the spirit of love thus breathed into my soul from my dear, far-off home. After the inspection this morning I held a religious service with my men. I will mention one simple incident which shows the benefit of such influence with these men. The merchant carts passing our camp one day last week were robbed. Complaint was made and a searching investigation instituted. The result is that no man from Company B is found who could be persuaded to join in this plundering. Some from all the other companies are found to be guilty and are to be severely punished. The boys were solicited to join in this work of plunder but they replied no, our Captain has said we must not steal or do anything else to please our enemies and offend God, but in all things act like true Christian men and so they all refused. I do not think that I will be able to see you all till about next Christmas when I do hope to see you all on a good long leave of absence. Much love to the precious children and to your dear parents. Your fond husband, Daniel Foster. US CIVIL WAR HDT WHAT? INDEX

EMILY DICKINSON EMILY DICKINSON

A report from Walt Whitman visiting the Union encampments in Culpepper, Virginia: “Specimen Days”

DOWN AT THE FRONT Here I am pretty well down toward the extreme front. Three or four days ago General S., who is now in chief command, (I believe Meade is absent, sick,) moved a strong force southward from camp as if intending business. They went to the Rapidan; there has since been some manoeuvring and a little fighting, but nothing of consequence. The telegraphic accounts given Monday morning last, make entirely too much of it, I should say. What General S. intended we here know not, but we trust in that competent commander. We were somewhat excited, (but not so very much either,) on Sunday, during the day and night, as orders were sent out to pack up and harness, and be ready to evacuate, to fall back towards Washington. But I was very sleepy and went to bed. Some tremendous shouts arousing me during the night, I went forth and found it was from the men above mention’d, who were returning. I talk’d with some of the men; as usual I found them full of gayety, endurance, and many fine little outshows, the signs of the most excellent good manliness of the world. It was a curious sight to see those shadowy columns moving through the night. I stood unobserv’d in the darkness and watch’d them long. The mud was very deep. The men had their usual burdens, overcoats, knapsacks, guns and blankets. Along and along they filed by me, with often a laugh, a song, a cheerful word, but never once a murmur. It may have been odd, but I never before so realized the majesty and reality of the American people en masse. It fell upon me like a great awe. The strong ranks moved neither fast nor slow. They had march’d seven or eight miles already through the slipping unctuous mud. The brave First corps stopt here. The equally brave Third corps moved on to Brandy station. The famous Brooklyn 14th are here, guarding the town. You see their red legs actively moving everywhere. Then they have a theatre of their own here. They give musical performances, nearly everything done capitally. Of course the audience is a jam. It is good sport to attend one of these entertainments of the 14th. I like to look around at the soldiers, and the general collection in front of the curtain, more than the scene on the stage. [Page 741]

PAYING THE BOUNTIES One of the things to note here now is the arrival of the paymaster with his strong box, and the payment of bounties to veterans re-enlisting. Major H. is here to- day, with a small mountain of greenbacks, rejoicing the hearts of the 2d division of the First corps. In the midst of a rickety shanty, behind a little table, sit the major and clerk Eldridge, with the rolls before them, and much moneys. A re- enlisted man gets in cash about $200 down, (and heavy instalments following, as the pay-days arrive, one after another.) The show of the men crowding around is quite exhilarating; I like to stand and look. They feel elated, their pockets full, and the ensuing furlough, the visit home. It is a scene of sparkling eyes and flush’d cheeks. The soldier has many gloomy and harsh experiences, and this makes up for some of them. Major H. is order’d to pay first all the re-enlisted men of the First corps their bounties and back pay, and then the rest. You hear the peculiar sound of the rustling of the new and crisp greenbacks by the hour, through the nimble fingers of the major and my friend clerk E.

US CIVIL WAR HDT WHAT? INDEX

EMILY DICKINSON EMILY DICKINSON

“Specimen Days”

RUMORS, CHANGES, &C. About the excitement of Sunday, and the orders to be ready to start, I have heard since that the said orders came from some cautious minor commander, and that the high principalities knew not and thought not of any such move; which is likely. The rumor and fear here intimated a long circuit by Lee, and flank attack on our right. But I cast my eyes at the mud, which was then at its deepest and palmiest condition, and retired composedly to rest. Still it is about time for Culpepper to have a change. Authorities have chased each other here like clouds in a stormy sky. Before the first Bull Run this was the rendezvous and camp of instruction of the secession troops. I am stopping at the house of a lady who has witness’d all the eventful changes of the war, along this route of contending armies. She is a widow, with a family of young children, and lives here with her sister in a large handsome house. A number of army officers board with them. [Page 742]

VIRGINIA Dilapidated, fenceless, and trodden with war as Virginia is, wherever I move across her surface, I find myself rous’d to surprise and admiration. What capacity for products, improvements, human life, nourishment and expansion. Everywhere that I have been in the Old Dominion, (the subtle mockery of that title now!) such thoughts have fill’d me. The soil is yet far above the average of any of the northern States. And how full of breadth the scenery, everywhere distant mountains, everywhere convenient rivers. Even yet prodigal in forest woods, and surely eligible for all the fruits, orchards, and flowers. The skies and atmosphere most luscious, as I feel certain, from more than a year’s residence in the State, and movements hither and yon. I should say very healthy, as a general thing. Then a rich and elastic quality, by night and by day. The sun rejoices in his strength, dazzling and burning, and yet, to me, never unpleasantly weakening. It is not the panting tropical heat, but invigorates. The north tempers it. The nights are often unsurpassable. Last evening (Feb. 8,) I saw the first of the new moon, the outlined old moon clear along with it; the sky and air so clear, such transparent hues of color, it seem’d to me I had never really seen the new moon before. It was the thinnest cut crescent possible. It hung delicate just above the sulky shadow of the Blue mountains. Ah, if it might prove an omen and good prophecy for this unhappy State.

US CIVIL WAR

March 12, Saturday: Emily Dickinson’s “My Sabbath” appeared in a New-York weekly edited by a couple of her cousins, The Round Table.

President Abraham Lincoln appointed General Ulysses S. Grant as general-in-chief of all the Union armies (General William T. Sherman succeeded General Grant as commander in the West). US CIVIL WAR HDT WHAT? INDEX

EMILY DICKINSON EMILY DICKINSON March 30, Wednesday: Emily Dickinson’s “Sunset” appeared in the Springfield Republican. A sloop of amber slips away Upon an ether sea, And wrecks in peace a purple tar, The son of ecstasy.

April: Emily Dickinson moved into a boardinghouse in Cambridgeport, Massachusetts in which her Norcross cousins lived, while her eyes were being treated by Doctor Henry Willard Williams of Boston (she would remain in Cambridgeport until November 28th).

The 88th Illinois Volunteer Infantry Regiment left Loudon, Tennessee heading toward Cleveland (until May).

A tragedy on a tight little island: the brewery on St. Helena was destroyed by fire.

There hadn’t been any slavery on the island of St. Helena, for a good long time, and notice, this wondrous thing had been achieved without any recourse to civil war. However, during this month, in the midst of a civil war, when an amendment to the United States Constitution abolishing slavery was passed by the federal Senate, that proposal would die there (during June it would fail to obtain the 2/3ds vote required to pass in the House of Representatives — it would not be enacted by the House until the afternoon of January 31, 1865, when a vote would be obtained of Yeas 119, Nays 56, not voting 8). “Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States ...” US CIVIL WAR

April 27, Wednesday: Emily Dickinson’s “Success” appeared anonymously in the Brooklyn Daily Union: Success is counted sweetest By those who ne’er succeed. To comprehend a nectar Requires sorest need. Not one of all the Purple Host Who took the Flag today Can tell the definition So clear of Victory As he defeated — dying — On whose forbidden ear The distant strains of triumph Burst agonized and clear! HDT WHAT? INDEX

EMILY DICKINSON EMILY DICKINSON May 13, Friday: Austin Dickinson was called up in the army draft but bought his way out by providing $500 for the hiring of a substitute soldier.11

The 88th Illinois Volunteer Infantry Regiment participated in the Battle Of Resaca, Georgia (into Sunday the 15th). CIVIL WAR

November 28, Monday: Emily Dickinson returned from Cambridgeport to Amherst, Massachusetts.

There was fighting at Buck Head Creek. US CIVIL WAR

11. There’s something to be pointed out here, about patriotism and capitalism. The standard story about capitalism is that it is this devouring monster, that over a course of time is going to relentlessly monetize anything and everything, until we wind up living our lives in a world in which although everything has its price nothing anymore has any real intrinsic value. It would seem to follow from that sort of regressionism, that in the past capitalism must have been less relentless than it now is. Nowadays a person who avoids patriotic risk of combat by hiring some poorer person to take the risk of life and limb on their behalf would at least attempt to keep this confidential. They would feel shame, or at least would fear being shamed (Donald J. Trump and William J. Clinton and George W. Bush spring to mind). It would seem to follow, therefore, that back in the days of the civil war, this would have needed to be at least equivalently the case. However, it would appear that this was not so. It would appear that back in the days of the US Civil War draft, one needed to make no particular attempt to maintain confidentiality if you were wealthy enough to buy your way out of your patriotic duty. You could pull off such a stunt with impunity. It seems that back then, it had not yet occurred to anyone to impugn the patriotism of wealthy American cowards. HDT WHAT? INDEX

EMILY DICKINSON EMILY DICKINSON

1865

April 1, Saturday: Edvard Grieg conducted an orchestra in public for the initial time, in Copenhagen.

Louis Moreau Gottschalk offered his final concert in New-York and then, in the evening, boarded a ship for San Francisco by way of the Isthmus of Panama.

The 113th US Colored Infantry, which included Private Richard Richardson, was consolidated with the 11th US Colored Infantry (Old) and the 112th U.S. Colored Infantry, to form the 113th US Colored Troops. US CIVIL WAR

When Union forces attacked at Five Forks, Virginia, this split the southern army. After opinioning that the Yankees had “developed a character so odious that death would be preferable to reunion with them,” Governor John Milton of Florida (no known relation to the English poet) put a bullet in his own head at his large slave plantation “Sylvania.” SUICIDE

Emily Dickinson moved to the Cambridgeport, Massachusetts boarding house again, for more eye treatments by Doctor Henry Willard Williams in Boston. She would remain in Cambridgeport this time until about October. Would this have been about the period in which the Daguerreotype below on the right would have HDT WHAT? INDEX

EMILY DICKINSON EMILY DICKINSON been made — and would this figure indeed be Emily?

October: We suppose it was during this month that Emily Dickinson returned from Cambridgeport to Amherst, Massachusetts.

James Russell Lowell published an article in the North American Review entitled “Thoreau’s Letters,” an article that biographer Henry S. Salt would characterize aptly as “a masterpiece of hostile innuendo and ingenious misrepresentation”:12 INGENIOUSLY HOSTILE

What contemporary, if he was in the fighting period of his life, since Nature sets limits about her conscription for spiritual fields, as the state does in physical warfare,) will ever forget what was somewhat vaguely called the “Transcendental Movement” of thirty years ago? Apparently set astirring by Carlyle’s essays on the “Signs of the Times,” and on “History,” the final

12. See the response to this article by the Reverend Thomas Wentworth Higginson in 1903: Emerson’s comment would be that Lowell had simply never forgiven Henry Thoreau “for having wounded his self-consciousness.” HDT WHAT? INDEX

EMILY DICKINSON EMILY DICKINSON and more immediate impulse seemed to be given by “Sartor Resartus.” At least the republication in Boston of that wonderful Abraham à Sancta Clara sermon on Lear’s text of the miserable forked radish gave the signal for a sudden mental and moral mutiny. Ecce nunc tempus acceptabile! was shouted on all hands with every variety of emphasis, and by voices of every conceivable pitch, representing the three sexes of men, women, and lady Mary Wortley Montagues. The nameless eagle of the tree Ygdrasil was about to sit at last, and wild-eyed enthusiasts rushed from all sides, each eager to thrust under the mystic bird that chalk egg from which the new and fairer Creation was to be hatched in due time. Redeunt Saturnia regna, — so far was certain, though in what shape, or by what methods, was still a matter of debate. Every possible form of intellectual and physical dyspepsia brought forth its gospel. Bran had its prophets, and the presartorial simplicity of Adam its martyrs, tailored impromptu from the tar-pot by incensed neighbors, and sent forth to illustrate the “feathered Mercury,” as defined by Webster and Worcester. Plainness of speech was carried to a pitch that would have taken away the breath of George Fox; and even swearing had its evangelists, who answered a simple inquiry after their health with an elaborate ingenuity of imprecation that might have been honorably mentioned by Marlborough in general orders. Everybody had a mission (with a capital M) to attend to everybody-else’s business. No brain but had its private maggot, which must have found pitiably short commons sometimes. Not a few impecunious zealots abjured the use of money (unless earned by other people), professing to live on the internal revenues of the spirit. Some had an assurance of instant millennium so soon as hooks and eyes should be substituted for buttons. Communities were established where everything was to be common but common sense. Men renounced their old gods, and hesitated only whether to bestow their furloughed allegiance on Thor or Budh. Conventions were held for every hitherto inconceivable purpose. The belated gift of tongues, as among the Fifth Monarchy men, spread like a contagion, rendering its victims incomprehensible to all Christian men; whether equally so to the most distant possible heathen or not, was unexperimented, though many would have subscribed liberally that a fair trial might be made. It was the pentecost of Shinar. The day of utterances reproduced the day of rebuses and anagrams, and there was nothing so simple that uncial letters and the style of Diphilus the Labyrinth could not make into a riddle. Many foreign revolutionists out of work added to the general misunderstanding their contribution of broken English in every most ingenious form of fracture. All stood ready at a moment’s notice to reform everything but themselves. The general motto was: “And we’ll talk with them, too, And take upon’s the mystery of things As if we were God’s spies.” Nature is always kind enough to give even her clouds a humorous lining. We have barely hinted at the comic side of the affair, for the material was endless. This was the whistle and trailing fuse of the shell, but there was a very solid and serious kernel, full of the most deadly explosiveness. Thoughtful men divined it, but the generality suspected nothing. The word “transcendental” then was the maid of all work for those who HDT WHAT? INDEX

EMILY DICKINSON EMILY DICKINSON could not think, as “pre-Raphaelite” has been more recently for people of the same limited housekeeping. The truth is, that there was a much nearer metaphysical relation and a much more distant æsthetic and literary relation between Carlyle and the Apostles of the Newness, as they were called in New England, than has commonly been supposed. Both represented the reaction and revolt against Philisterei, a renewal of the old battle begun in modern times by Erasmus and Reuchlin, and continued by Lessing, Goethe, and, in a far narrower sense, by Heine in Germany, and of which Fielding, Sterne, and Wordsworth in different ways have been the leaders in England. It was simply a struggle for fresh air, in which, if the windows could not be opened, there was danger that panes would be broken, though painted with images of saints and martyrs. Light colored by these reverend effigies was none the more respirable for being picturesque. There is only one thing better than tradition, and that is the original and eternal life out of which all tradition takes its rise. It was this life which the reformers demanded, with more or less dearness of consciousness and expression, life in politics, life in literature, life in religion. Of what use to import a gospel from Judæa, if we leave behind the soul that made it possible, the God who keeps it forever real and present? Surely Abana and Pharpar are better than Jordan, if a living faith be mixed with those waters and none with these. Scotch Presbyterianism as a motive of spiritual progress was dead; New England Puritanism was in like manner dead; in other words, Protestantism had made its fortune and no longer protested; bur till Carlyle spoke out in the Old World and Emerson in the New, no one had dared to proclaim, Le roi est mort: vive le roi! The meaning of which proclamation was essentially this: the vital spirit has long since departed out of this form once so kingly, and the great seal has been in commission long enough; but meanwhile the soul of man, from which all power emanates and to which it reverts, still survives in undiminished royalty; God still survives, little as you gentlemen of the Commission seem to be aware of it, — nay, may possibly outlive the whole of you, incredible as it may appear. The truth is, that both Scotch Presbyterianism and New England Puritanism made their new avatar in Carlyle and Emerson, the heralds of their formal decease, and the tendency of the one toward Authority and of the other toward Independency might have been prophesied by whoever had studied history. The necessity was nor so much in the men as in the principles they represented and the traditions which overruled them. The Puritanism of the past found its unwilling poet in Hawthorne, the rarest creative imagination of the century, the rarest in some ideal respects since Shakespeare; but the Puritanism that cannot die, the Puritanism that made New England what it is, and is destined to make America what it should be, found its voice in Emerson. Though holding himself aloof from all active partnership in movements of reform, he has been the sleeping partner who has supplied a great part of their capital. The artistic range of Emerson is narrow, as every well-read critic must feel at once; and so is that of Æschylus, so is that of Dante, so is that of Montaigne, so is that of Schiller, so is that of nearly every one except Shakespeare; but there is a gauge of height no less than of breadth, of individuality as well as of comprehensiveness, and, above all, there is the HDT WHAT? INDEX

EMILY DICKINSON EMILY DICKINSON standard of genetic power, the test of the masculine as distinguished from the receptive minds. There are staminate plants in literature, that make no fine show of fruit, but without whose pollen, the quintessence of fructifying gold, the garden had been barren. Emerson’s mind is emphatically one of these, and there is no man to whom our æsthetic culture owes so much. The Puritan revolt had made us ecclesiastically, and the Revolution politically independent, but we were still socially and intellectually moored to English thought, till Emerson cut the cable and gave us a chance at the dangers and the glories of blue water. No man young enough to have felt it can forget, or cease to be grateful for, the mental and moral nudge which he received from the writings of his high-minded and brave- spirited countryman. That we agree with him, or that he always agrees with himself, is aside from the question; but that he arouses in us something that we are the better for having awakened, whether that something be of opposition or assent, that he speaks always to what is highest and least selfish in us, few Americans of the generation younger than his own would be disposed to deny. His oration before the Phi Beta Kappa society at Cambridge, some thirty years ago, was an event without any formal parallel in our literary annals, a scene to be always treasured in the memory for its picturesqueness and its inspiration. What crowded and breathless aisles, what windows clustering with eager heads, what enthusiasm of approval, what grim silence of foregone dissent! It was our Yankee version of a lecture by Abelard, our Harvard parallel to the last public appearances of Fichte. We said that the “Transcendental Movement” was the protestant spirit of Puritanism seeking a new outlet and an escape from forms and creeds which compressed rather than expressed it. In its motives, its preaching, and its results, it differed radically from the doctrine of Carlyle. The Scotchman, with all his genius, and his humor gigantesque as that of Rabelais, has grown shriller and shriller with years, degenerating sometimes into a common scold, and emptying very unsavory vials of wrath on the head of the sturdy British Socrates of worldly common sense. The teaching of Emerson tended much more exclusively to self-culture and the independent development of the individual man. It seemed to many almost Pythagorean in its voluntary seclusion from commonwealth affairs. Both Carlyle and Emerson were disciples of Goethe, but Emerson in a far truer sense; and while the one, from his bias toward the eccentric, has degenerated more and more into mannerism, the other has clarified steadily toward perfection of style, — exquisite fineness of material, unobtrusive lowness of tone and simplicity of fashion, the most high-bred garb of expression. Whatever may be said of his thought, nothing can be finer than the delicious limpidness of his phrase. If it was ever questionable whether democracy could develop a gentleman, the problem has been affirmatively solved at last. Carlyle, in his cynicism and his admiration of force as such, has become at last positively inhuman; Emerson, reverencing strength, seeking the highest outcome of the individual, has found that society and politics are also main elements in the attainment of the desired end, and has drawn steadily manward and worldward. The two men represent respectively those grand personifications in the drama of Æschylus,  and  . HDT WHAT? INDEX

EMILY DICKINSON EMILY DICKINSON Among the pistullate plants kindled to fruitage by the Emersonian pollen, Thoreau is thus far the most remarkable; and it is something eminently fitting that his posthumous works should be offered us by Emerson, for they are strawberries from his own garden. A singular mixture of varieties, indeed, there is; — alpine, some of them, with the flavor of rare mountain air; others wood, tasting of sunny roadside banks or shy openings in the forest; and not a few seedlings swollen hugely by culture, but lacking the fine natural aroma of the more modest kinds. Strange books there are of his, and interesting in many ways, — instructive chiefly as showing how considerable a crop may be raised on a comparatively narrow close of mind, and how much a man may make of his life if he will assiduously follow it, though perhaps never truly finding it at last. We have just been renewing our recollection of Mr. Thoreau’s writings, and have read through his six volumes in the order of their production. We shall try to give an adequate report of their impression upon us both as critic and as mere reader. He seems to us to have been a man with so high a conceit of himself that he accepted without questioning, and insisted on our accepting, his defects and weaknesses of character as virtues and powers peculiar to himself. Was he indolent, he finds none of the activities which attract or employ the rest of mankind worthy of him. Was he wanting in the qualities that make success, it is success that is contemptible, and not himself that lacks persistency and purpose. Was he poor, money was an unmixed evil. Did his life seem a selfish one, he condemns doing good as one of the weakest of superstitions. To be of use was with him the most killing bait of the wily tempter Uselessness. He had no faculty of generalization from outside of himself, or at least no experience which would supply the material of such, and he makes his own whim the law, his own range the horizon of the universe. He condemns a world, the hollowness of whose satisfactions he has never had the means of testing, and we recognize Apemantus behind the mask of Timon. He had little active imagination; of the receptive he had much. His appreciation is of the highest quality; his critical power, from want of continuity of mind, very limited and inadequate. He somewhere cites a simile from Ossian, as an example of the superiority of the old poetry to the new, though, even were the historic evidence less convincing, the sentimental melancholy of those poems should be conclusive of their modernness. He had no artistic power such as controls a great work to the serene balance of completeness, but exquisite mechanical skill in the shaping of sentences and paragraphs, or (more rarely) short bits of verse for the expression of a detached thought, sentiment, or image. His works give one the feeling of a sky full of stars, — something impressive and exhilarating certainly, something high overhead and freckles thickly with spots of isolated brightness; but whether these have any mutual relation with each other, or have any concern with our mundane matters, is for the most part matter of conjecture, — astrology as yet, and not astronomy. It is curious, considering what Thoreau afterward became, that he was not by nature an observer. He only saw the things he looked for, and was less poet than naturalist. Till he built his Walden shanty, he did not know that the hickory grew in Concord. Till he went to Maine, he had never seen phosphorescent wood, a HDT WHAT? INDEX

EMILY DICKINSON EMILY DICKINSON phenomenon early familiar to most country boys. At forty he speaks of the seeding of the pine as a new discovery, though one should have thought that its gold-dust of blowing pollen might have earlier drawn his eye. Neither his attention nor his genius was of the spontaneous kind. He discovered nothing. He thought everything a discovery of his own, from moonlight to the planting of acorns and nuts by squirrels. This is a defect in his character, but one of his chief charms as a writer. Everything grows fresh under his hand. He delved in his mind and nature; he planted them with all manner of native and foreign seeds, and reaped assiduously. He was not merely solitary, he would be isolated, and succeeded at last in almost persuading himself that he was autochthonous. He valued everything in proportion as he fancied it to be exclusively his own. He complains in “Walden,” that there is no one in Concord with whom he could talk of Oriental literature, though the man was living within two miles of his hut who had introduced him to it. This intellectual selfishness becomes sometimes almost painful in reading him. He lacked that generosity of “communication” which Johnson admired in Burke. De Quincey tells us that Wordsworth was impatient when any one else spoke of mountains, as if he had a peculiar property in them. And we can readily understand why it should be so: no one is satisfied with another’s appreciation of his mistress. But Thoreau seems to have prized a lofty way of thinking (often we should be inclined to call it a remote one) not so much because it was good in itself as because he wished few to share it with him. It seems now and then as if he did not seek to lure others up “above our lower region of turmoil,” but to leave his own name cut on the mountain peak as the first climber. This itch of originality infects his thought and style. To be misty is not to be mystic. He turns commonplaces end for end, and fancies it makes something new of them. As we walk down Park Street, our eye is caught by Dr. Windship’s dumb- bells, one of which bears an inscription testifying that it is the heaviest ever put up at arm’s length by any athlete; and in reading Mr. Thoreau’s books we cannot help feeling as if he sometimes invited our attention to a particular sophism as the biggest yet maintained by any single writer. He seeks, at all risks, for perversity of thought, and revives the age of concetti while he fancies himself going back to a pre-classical nature. “A day,” he says, “passed in the society of those Greek sages, such as described in the Banquet of Xenophon, would not be comparable with the dry wit of decayed cranberry-vines and the fresh Attic salt of the moss-beds.” It is not so much the True that he loves as the Out-of-the-Way. As the Brazen Age shows itself in other men by exaggeration of phrase, so in him by extravagance of statement. He wishes always to trump your suit and to ruff when you least expect it. Do you love Nature because she is beautiful? He will find a better argument in her ugliness. Are you tired of the artificial man? He instantly dresses you up an ideal in a Penobscot Indian, and attributes to this creature of his otherwise-mindedness as peculiarities things that are common to all woodsmen, white or red, and this simply because he has not studied the pale-faced variety. This notion of an absolute originality, as if one could have a patent-right in it, is an absurdity. A man cannot escape in thought, any more than he can in language, from the past and the present. As no one ever invents a word, and yet language somehow HDT WHAT? INDEX

EMILY DICKINSON EMILY DICKINSON grows by general contribution and necessity, so it is with thought. Mr. Thoreau seems to us to insist in public on going back to flint and steel, when there is a match-box in his pocket which he knows very well how to use at a pinch. Originality consists in power of digesting and assimilating thought, so that they become part of our life and substance. Montaigne, for example, is one of the most original of authors, though he helped himself to ideas in every direction. But they turn to blood and coloring in his style, and give a freshness of complexion that is forever charming. In Thoreau much seems yet to be foreign and unassimilated, showing itself in symptoms of indigestion. A preacher up of Nature, we now and then detect under the surly and stoic garb something of the sophist and the sentimentalizer. We are far from implying that this was conscious on his part. But it is much easier for a man to impose on himself when he measures only with himself. A greater familiarity with ordinary men would have done Thoreau good, by showing him how many fine qualities are common to the race. The radical vice of his theory of life was, that he confounded physical with spiritual remoteness from men. One is far enough withdrawn from his fellows if he keep himself clear of their weaknesses. He is not so truly withdrawn as exiled, if he refuse to share in their strength. It is a morbid self-consciousness that pronounces the world of men empty and worthless before trying it, the instinctive evasion of one who is sensible of some innate weakness, and retorts the accusation of it before any has made it but himself. To a healthy mind, the world is a constant challenge of opportunity. Mr. Thoreau had not a healthy mind, or he would not have been so fond of prescribing. His whole life was a search for the doctor. The old mystics had a wiser sense of what the world was worth. They ordained a severe apprenticeship to law and even ceremonial, in order to the gaining of freedom and mastery over these. Seven years of service for Rachel were to be rewarded at last with Leah. Seven other years of faithfulness with her were to win them at last the true bride of their souls. Active Life was with them the only path to the Contemplative. Thoreau had no humor, and this implies that he was a sorry logician. Himself an artist in rhetoric, he confounds thought with style when he undertakes to speak of the latter. He was forever talking of getting away from the world, but he must be always near enough to it, nay, to the Concord comer of it, to feel the impression he makes there. He verifies the shrewd remark of Sainte-Beuve, “On touche oncore à son temps et très- fort, même quand on le repousse.» This egotism of his is a Stylites pillar after all, a seclusion which keeps him in the public eye. The dignity of man is an excellent thing, but therefore to hold one’s self too sacred and precious is the reverse of excellent. There is something delightfully absurd in six volumes addressed to a world of such “vulgar fellows” as Thoreau affirmed his fellow-men to be. We once had a glimpse of a genuine solitary who spent his winter one hundred and fifty miles beyond all human communication, and there dwelt with his rifle as his only confidant. Compared with this, the shanty on Walden Pond has something the air, it must be confessed, of the Hermitage of La Chevrette. We do not believe that the way to a true cosmopolitanism carries one into the woods or the society of musquashes. Perhaps the narrowest provincialism is that of HDT WHAT? INDEX

EMILY DICKINSON EMILY DICKINSON Self; that of Kleinwinkel is nothing to it. The natural man, like the singing birds, comes out of the forest as inevitably as the natural bear and the wildcat stick there. To seek to be natural implies a consciousness that forbids all naturalness forever. It is as easy — and no easier — to be natural in a salon as in a swamp, if one do not aim at it, for what we call unnaturalness always has its spring in a man’s thinking too much about himself. “It is impossible,” said Turgot, “for a vulgar man to be simple.” We look upon a great deal of the modern sentimentalism about Nature as a mark of disease. It is one more symptom of the general liver complaint. In a man of wholesome constitution the wilderness is well enough for a mood or a vacation, but not for a habit of life. Those who have most loudly advertised their passion for seclusion and their intimacy with nature, from Petrarch down, have been mostly sentimentalists, unreal men, misanthropes on the spindle side, solacing an uneasy suspicion of themselves by professing contempt for their kind. They make demands on the world in advance proportioned to their inward measure of their own merit, and are angry that the world pays only by the visible measure of performance. It is true of Rousseau, the modern founder of the sect, true of St. Pierre, his intellectual child, and of Chateaubriand, his grandchild, the inventor of what we may call the primitive forest cure, and who first was touched by the solemn falling of a tree from natural decay in the windless silence of the woods. It is a very shallow view that affirms trees and rocks to be healthy, and cannot see that men in communities are just as true to the laws of their organization and destiny; that can tolerate the puffin and the fox, but not the fool and the knave; that would shun politics because of its demagogues, and snuff up the stench of the obscene fungus. The divine life of Nature is more wonderful, more various, more sublime in man than in any other of her works, and the wisdom that is gained by commerce with men, as Montaigne and Shakespeare gained it, or with one’s own soul among men, as Dante, is the most delightful, as it is the most precious, of all. In outward nature it is still man that interests us, and we care far less for the things seen than the way in which poetic eyes like Wordsworth’s; or Thoreau’s see them, and the reflections they cast there. To hear the to-do that is often made over the simple fact that a man sees the image of himself in the outward world, one is reminded of a savage when he for the first time catches a glimpse of himself in a looking-glass. “Venerable child of Nature,” we are tempted to say, “to whose science in the invention of the tobacco-pipe, to whose art in the tattooing of thine undegenerate hide not yet enslaved by tailors, we are slowly striving to climb back, the miracle thou beholdest is sold in my unhappy country for a shilling!” If matters go on as they have done, and everybody must needs blab of all the favors that have been done him by roadside and river- brink and woodland walk, as if to kiss and tell were no longer treachery, it will be a positive refreshment to meet a man who is as superbly indifferent to Nature as she is to him. By and by we shall have John Smith, of No. ——12, ——12th Street, advertising that he is not the J.S. who saw a cow-lily on Thursday last, as he never saw one in his life, would not see one if he could, and is prepared to prove an alibi on the day in question. HDT WHAT? INDEX

EMILY DICKINSON EMILY DICKINSON Solitary communion with Nature does not seem to have been sanitary or sweetening in its influence on Thoreau’s character. On the contrary, his letters show him more cynical as he grew older. While he studied with respectful attention the minks and woodchucks, his neighbors, he looked with utter contempt on the august drama of destiny of which his country was the scene, and on which the curtain had already risen. He was converting us back to a state of nature “so eloquently,” as Voltaire said of Rousseau, “that he almost persuaded us to go on all fours,” while the wiser fates were making it possible for us to walk erect for the first time. Had he conversed more with his fellows, his sympathies would have widened with the assurance that his peculiar genius had more appreciation, and his writings a larger circle of readers, or at last a warmer one, than he dreamed of. We have the highest testimony13 to the natural sweetness, sincerity, and nobleness of his temper, and in his books an equally irrefragable one to the rare quality of his mind. He was not a strong thinker, but a sensitive feeler. Yet his mind strikes us as cold and wintry in its purity. A light snow has fallen everywhere where he seems to come on the track of the shier sensations that would elsewhere leave no trace. We think greater compression would have done more for his fame. A feeling of sameness comes over us as we read so much. Trifles are recorded with an overminute punctuality and conscientiousness of detail. We cannot help thinking sometimes of the man who “watches, starves, freezes, and sweats To learn but catechisms and alphabets, Of unconcerning things, matters of fact,” and sometimes of the saying of the Persian poet, that “when the owl would boast, he boasts of catching mice at the edge of a hole.” We could readily part with some of his affectations. It was well enough for Pythagoras to say, once for all, “When I was Euphorbus at the siege of Troy”; not so well for Thoreau to travesty it into “When I was a shepherd on the plains of Assyria.” A naive thing said over again is anything but naive. But with every exception, there is no writing comparable with Thoreau’s in kind, that is comparable with it in degree where it is best; where it disengages itself, that is, from the tangled roots and dead leaves of a second-hand Orientalism, and runs limpid and smooth and broadening as it runs, a mirror for whatever is grand and lovely in both worlds. George Sand says neatly, that “Art is not a study of positive reality,” (actuality were the fitter word,) “but a seeking after ideal truth.” It would be doing very inadequate justice to Thoreau if we left it to be inferred that this ideal element did not exist in him, and that too in larger proportion, if less obtrusive, than his nature-worship. He took nature as the mountain-path to an ideal world. If the path wind a good deal, if he record too faithfully every trip over a root, if he botanize somewhat wearisomely, he gives us now and then superb outlooks from some jutting crag, and brings us out at last into an illimitable ether, where the breathing is not difficult for those who have any true touch of the climbing spirit. His shanty- life was a mere impossibility, so far as his own conception of it goes, as an entire independency of mankind. The tub of Diogenes had a sounder bottom. Thoreau’s experiment actually presupposed all that complicated civilization which it 13. Mr. Emerson, in the Biographical Sketch prefixed to the “Excursions.” HDT WHAT? INDEX

EMILY DICKINSON EMILY DICKINSON theoretically abjured. He squatted on another man’s land; he borrows an axe; his boards, his nails, his bricks, his mortar, his books, his lamp, his fish-hooks, his plough, his hoe, all turn state’s evidence against him as an accomplice in the sin of that artificial civilization which rendered it possible that such a person as Henry D. Thoreau should exist at all. Magnis tamen excidit ausis. His aim was a noble and a useful one, in the direction of “plain living and high thinking.” It was a practical sermon on Emerson’s text that “things are in the saddle and ride mankind,” an attempt to solve Carlyle’s problem of “lessening your denominator.” His whole life was a rebuke of the waste and aimlessness of our American luxury, which is an abject enslavement to tawdry upholstery. He had “fine translunary things” in him. His better style as a writer is in keeping with the simplicity and purity of his life. We have said that his range was narrow, but to be a master is to be a master. He had caught his English at its living source, among the poets and prose-writers of its best days; his literature was extensive and recondite; his quotations are always nuggets of the purest ore; there are sentences of his as perfect as anything in the language, his thoughts as clearly crystallized; his metaphors and images are always fresh from the soil; he had watched Nature like a detective who is to go upon the stand; as we read him, it seems as if all-out-of-doors had kept a diary and become its own Montaigne; we look at the landscape as in a Claude Lorraine glass; compared with his, all other books of similar aim, even White’s Selborne, seem dry as a country clergyman’s meteorological journal in an old almanac. He belongs with Donne and Browne and Novalis; if not with the originally creative men, with the scarcely smaller class who are peculiar, and whose leaves shed their invisible thought-seed like ferns. HDT WHAT? INDEX

EMILY DICKINSON EMILY DICKINSON

1866

Emily Dickinson, who had never bothered to read the poetry of Walt Whitman, at this point wrote to her sister- in-law, Susan Gilbert Dickinson, anent Susan’s and Austin’s vacation at the seashore, in such manner as to indicate to us that very likely she had been reading in Henry Thoreau’s CAPE COD: Was the sea cordial? Kiss him for Thoreau.

W.D. O’Connor’s THE GOOD GRAY POET, a prelude to his 1892 “The Carpenter” in which he would even more straightforwardly portray Walt Whitman as a Christ figure, and a prelude as well to David Warner’s 1990 “The Good G(r)ay Poet,” outing Whitman’s sexuality. HDT WHAT? INDEX

EMILY DICKINSON EMILY DICKINSON February: David M. Smith, a telegrapher in the Ellenville D & H Canal office, failed to show up for work and would never again be seen alive.

The widow Helen Fiske Hunt, moving into the Newport boarding house occupied by the Reverend Thomas Wentworth Higginsons (that of Friend Hannah Dame), heard of Emily Dickinson’s poetry.

HELEN HUNT JACKSON

February 14, Wednesday: Harrison Gray Dyar, Jr. was born in New-York.

Emily Dickinson’s “The Snake” appeared in the Springfield Republican. Sweet is the swamp with its secrets, Until we meet a snake; ’Tis then we sigh for houses, And our departure take At that enthralling gallop That only childhood knows. A snake is summer’s treason, And guile is where it goes.

The San Francisco, California Dramatic Chronicle explained, on its page 2, the origin of the name “Mark Twain”: A Washoe genius yesterday explained to us the origin of the nom de plume “Mark Twain.” “Wall now, d’ye see,” said our informant, “‘Mark’ — that is Sam, d’ye see — used to take his regular drinks at Johnny Doyle’s. Well, ‘Mark,’ that is Sam, d’ye see, used to run his face, bein’ often short of legal tenders. Well, ‘Mark,’ that is Sam, d’ye understand, always used to take two horns consecutive, one right after the other, and when he come in there and took ’em on tick, Johnny used to sing out to his barkeep, who carried a lump of chalk in his weskit pocket and kept the HDT WHAT? INDEX

EMILY DICKINSON EMILY DICKINSON score, ‘mark twain,’ whereupon the barkeep would score two drinks to Sam’s account — and so it was, d’ye see, that he come to be called ‘Mark Twain.’”

NEVER READ AHEAD! TO APPRECIATE FEBRUARY 14TH, 1866 AT ALL ONE MUST APPRECIATE IT AS A TODAY (THE FOLLOWING DAY, TOMORROW, IS BUT A PORTION OF THE UNREALIZED FUTURE AND IFFY AT BEST).

Emily Dickinson “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project HDT WHAT? INDEX

EMILY DICKINSON EMILY DICKINSON

1867

February: An ice dam built up at the piers of Rochester, New York’s Erie Railroad bridge, diverting waters of the Genesee River into the Genesee Valley Canal and flooding parts of the 3rd and 8th wards.

A new minister, the Reverend J.L. Jenkins, took over at the First Church in Amherst, Massachusetts. There was discussion of the erection of a new church building. HDT WHAT? INDEX

EMILY DICKINSON EMILY DICKINSON

1870

August 17, Wednesday: For the 1st time the Reverend Thomas Wentworth Higginson paid a visit to Emily Dickinson. He would write home to his ailing wife that he had never been “with anyone who drained my nerve power so much.” HDT WHAT? INDEX

EMILY DICKINSON EMILY DICKINSON

1871

Alfred Habegger’s 2001 biography of Emily Dickinson, MY WARS ARE LAID AWAY IN BOOKS has it that she “came to admire” Henry Thoreau very much, and in this year wrote a poem as much about herself as about him: ’Twas fighting for his Life he was— That sort accomplish well— The Ordnance of Vitality Is frugal of its Ball. It aims once—kills once—conquers once— There is no second War In that Campaign inscrutable Of the Interior. HDT WHAT? INDEX

EMILY DICKINSON EMILY DICKINSON

1873

July: Henry Wilder Foote’s “James Freeman and King’s Chapel, 1782-1787,” Religious Magazine and Monthly Review.

The widow Helen Fiske Hunt came to Amherst, Massachusetts to recover from an illness.

December 3, Wednesday: In Amherst, Massachusetts to deliver a lecture, the Reverend Thomas Wentworth Higginson met for a 2d and final time with Emily Dickinson. HDT WHAT? INDEX

EMILY DICKINSON EMILY DICKINSON

1875

October: Macmillan’s Magazine published the 2d part of Robert Louis Stevenson’s “John Knox, and His Relations to Women.”

Helen Fiske Hunt got married with her 2d husband, William Sharpless Jackson. Emily Dickinson wrote to the newlyweds “Have I word but Joy?”

HELEN HUNT JACKSON HDT WHAT? INDEX

EMILY DICKINSON EMILY DICKINSON November 29, Monday: The Reverend Thomas Wentworth Higginson read some of Emily Dickinson’s poetry to the Woman’s Club of Boston. HDT WHAT? INDEX

EMILY DICKINSON EMILY DICKINSON

1876

August 20, Sunday: Mrs. Helen Hunt Jackson asked Emily Dickinson to contribute to an anthology of anonymous verse.

After experiencing the premiere of Richard Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen, Pyotr Illyich Tchaikovsky wrote to his brother Modest, “Nibelungen may perhaps be a very great work, but there has certainly never been anything as long-winded and boring as this interminable piece. The accumulation of the most complex and arcane harmonies, the colorlessness of the vocal lines, the endlessly long dialogues, the absence of anything of the slightest interest or poetic quality in the subject matter — all this stretches the nerves almost beyond endurance.” “I have seen and greatly enjoyed the first act of everything Wagner created, but the effect on me has always been so powerful that one act was quite sufficient; after two acts I have gone away physically exhausted.” —Mark Twain

October 10, Tuesday: Mrs. Helen Hunt Jackson visited Emily Dickinson. HDT WHAT? INDEX

EMILY DICKINSON EMILY DICKINSON

1877

Massachusetts Supreme Court Justice Otis Lord, at 65 years of age, lost his wife and soon there would begin a curious courtship between himself and a Amherst recluse, the 47-year-old Emily Dickinson, a courtship that would never come to anything — although really this wouldn’t be Miss Emily’s fault.

February 11, Sunday: The Reverend J.L. Jenkins preached his final sermon at the First Church in Amherst, Massachusetts (he was relocating his family to Pittsfield).

A report from Walt Whitman: “Specimen Days”

In the soft rose and pale gold of the declining light, this beautiful evening, I heard the first hum and preparation of awakening spring — very faint — whether in the earth or roots, or starting of insects, I know not — but it was audible, as I lean’d on a rail (I am down in my country quarters awhile,) and look’d long at the western horizon. Turning to the east, Sirius, as the shadows deepen’d, came forth in dazzling splendor. And great Orion; and a little to the north-east the big Dipper, standing on end. HDT WHAT? INDEX

EMILY DICKINSON EMILY DICKINSON

1878

July 25, Thursday: An anonymous article appeared in the Springfield Republican which cited Emily Dickinson as the collaborator for Mrs. Helen Hunt Jackson on the “Saxe Holm” stories.

“Black Bart the PO8” held up the stage traveling from Quincy to Oroville in California and left behind a note: Here I lay me down to sleep To wait the coming morrow, Perhaps success, perhaps defeat, And everlasting sorrow. Let come what will, I'll try it on, My condition can’t be worse; And if there's money in that box ’Tis munny in my purse.

October 24, Thursday: Clara Schumann was given a day of celebration in Leipzig, commemorating the 50th anniversary of her 1st public performance at the Leipzig Gewandhaus. In the morning she receives numerous presents, telegrams and flowers. At her concert, she played Robert Schumann’s Piano Concerto. The orchestra presents her with a laurel wreath, with the names of composers whose music she performed during her career on the leaves. Later she attended a party in her honor, serenaded by the Paulinerchor on her arrival.

The Paumanok Long Island Historical Society broke ground for its new headquarters.

Mr. and Mrs. Helen Hunt Jackson visited with Emily Dickinson in Amherst, Massachusetts. HDT WHAT? INDEX

EMILY DICKINSON EMILY DICKINSON November 20, Wednesday: The book A MASQUE OF POETS appeared, containing among other anonymous poetry Emily Dickinson’s “Success” (which had been written in 1859 and previously published anonymously in 1864). Success is counted sweetest By those who ne’er succeed. To comprehend a nectar Requires sorest need. Not one of all the Purple Host Who took the Flag today Can tell the definition So clear of Victory As he defeated — dying — On whose forbidden ear The distant strains of triumph Burst agonized and clear! HDT WHAT? INDEX

EMILY DICKINSON EMILY DICKINSON

1879

January: The beginning of serial publication of Fyodor Mikhaylovich Dostoevski’s THE BROTHERS KARAMAZOV in The Russian Herald: “From the Author,” Books I, II (Scandalous scene at the monastery. Fedor and Ivan leave.)

Professor Friedrich Nietzsche’s illness worsened.

Emily Dickinson began to correspond directly, rather than through intermediaries, with Thomas Niles of the publishing house of Robert Brothers.

Two poems by Richard Realf appeared in The Century Magazine: –––— AN EPITAPH. This poet was very wealthy. If he missed Worlds’ honors, and worlds’ plaudits, and the wage Of the worlds’ deft lackeys, still his lips were kissed Daily by those high angels who assuage The thirstings of the seers. For he was Born unto singing, and a burthen lay Mightily on him, and he moaned because He could not rightly utter to the day What God taught in the night. Yet oft would fall Swift Power upon him, and winged tongues of flame; And blessings reached him from poor souls in thrall. And benedictions from black pits of shame. And little children’s loves, and old men’s prayers, And a Great Hand that led him unawares. –––— INTERPRETATION. A Dreaming Poet lay upon the ground. He plucked the grasses with his listless hands. No voice was near him save the wishful sound Of the sea cooing to the unbosomed sands. He leaned his heart upon the naked sod. He heard the audible pulse of nature beat. He trembled greatly at the Word of God Spoken in the rushes rustling at his feet. With inward vision his outward sight grew dim, He knew the rhythmic secret of the spheres, He caught the cadence, and a noble hymn, Swam swan-like in upon the gliding years. HDT WHAT? INDEX

EMILY DICKINSON EMILY DICKINSON

1880

August: Continuation of serial publication of Fyodor Mikhaylovich Dostoevski’s THE BROTHERS KARAMAZOV in The Russian Herald: Book XI, 6-10 (Alesha was voicing Ivan’s dilemma, of whether to testify or remain silent).

On St. Helena a pair of storks were sighted but when one was shot the other simply died. A couple of pairs of ostriches were imported but both the males would die within 10 months.

It was perhaps during this month that Charles Wadsworth made his final visit to Emily Dickinson.

November: Completion of serial publication of Fyodor Mikhaylovich Dostoevski’s THE BROTHERS KARAMAZOV in The Russian Herald: Epilogue (Alesha’s speech at Iliusha’s stone.)

Robert Louis Stevenson, Frances (Fanny) Matilda Vandegrift (or Van de Grift) Stevenson, and her 12-year-old son Samuel Lloyd Osbourne arrived in Davos, Switzerland (they would remain there until April 1881).

A charity organization asked Emily Dickinson to contribute some of her poetry for a money-raising sale that they were organizing.

Early in this month Soon Chiao-chun (or Soon Yao-ju or Charlie Jones Soon) arrived at Wilmington, North Carolina aboard a US government cutter, possibly the Colfax. While there he would attend the 5th Street Methodist Church and be converted to Christianity by its pastor, the Reverend Thomas Page Ricaud. SOONG DYNASTY HDT WHAT? INDEX

EMILY DICKINSON EMILY DICKINSON

1881

The poet Emily Dickinson, who had never bothered to read the poetry of Walt Whitman, at this point wrote to her cousins, Louise and Frances Norcross, anent a recent series of structure fires, in such manner as to indicate to us that very likely she had been reading WALDEN: The fire-bells are oftener now, almost, than the church-bells. Thoreau would wonder which did the most harm. This incidental appeal to the image of the ringing of the parish bells in the 2d chapter,

WALDEN: If I should only give a few pulls at the parish bell-rope, as for a fire, that is, without setting the bell, there is hardly a man on his farm in the outskirts of Concord, notwithstanding that press of engagements which was his excuse so many times this morning, nor a boy, nor a woman, I might almost say, but would forsake all and follow that sound, not mainly to save property from the flames, but, if we will confess the truth, much more to see it burn, since burn it must, and we, be it known, did not set it on fire, –or to see it put out, and have a hand in it, if that is done as handsomely; yes, even if it were the parish church itself.

has been used, by Thomas W. Ford, to legitimate the idea that the author of the convention-mocking deathbed poem “I heard a Fly buzz — when I died” had been taking Henry Thoreau’s “Where I Lived and What I Lived For” very seriously indeed, and in real earnest had been seeking “to determine for herself whether the Transcendental harmony would be revealed if she held an undiverted gaze on the fact.” I heard a fly buzz when I died; The stillness round my form Was like the stillness in the air Between the heaves of storm. The eyes beside had wrung them dry, And breaths were gathering sure For that last onset, when the king Be witnessed in his power. I willed my keepsakes, signed away What portion of me I Could make assignable,—and then There interposed a fly, With blue, uncertain, stumbling buzz, Between the light and me; And then the windows failed, and then I could not see to see. HDT WHAT? INDEX

EMILY DICKINSON EMILY DICKINSON

It was in about this year that Emily’s lawyer brother Austin Dickinson, who was in his early 50s, began his torrid adulterous affair with Mrs. Mabel Loomis Todd, the much younger wife of Amherst College astronomy professor David Peck Todd.

This affair would destroy Austin’s marriage with Mrs. Susan Gilbert Dickinson, and transform his home “Evergreens” into a house of scandal in the town. Refer to AUSTIN AND MABEL, by Polly Longsworth (1984). HDT WHAT? INDEX

EMILY DICKINSON EMILY DICKINSON Incidentally, here is the above image, which was exposed in early 1848, unretouched and uncropped: HDT WHAT? INDEX

EMILY DICKINSON EMILY DICKINSON

1883

March 31, Saturday: Thomas Niles of the publishing house of Robert Brothers asked Emily Dickinson for permission to put out a volume of her poetry.

October: Emily Dickinson fell victim to “nervous prostration.”

At some point late in her life, perhaps not at this particular point, Emily wrote, for a nephew, a satiric poem on the Bible which we can be sure would never have been written by the Henry Thoreau who loved “that old book”: The Bible is an antique Volume— Written by faded Men At the suggestion of Holy Spectres— Subjects — Bethlehem— Eden — the ancient Homestead— Satan — The Brigadier— Judas — the Great Defaulter— David — the Troubadour— Sin — a distinguished Precipice Others must resist— Boys that “believe” are very lonesome— Other Boys are “lost”— Had but the Tale a warbling Teller— All the Boys would come— Orpheus’ Sermon captivated— It did not condemn— READING THE POEM ALOUD HDT WHAT? INDEX

EMILY DICKINSON EMILY DICKINSON

1884

June 14, Saturday: The Saturday Evening Gazette’s “New Publications” column provided a review of Thoreau’s SUMMER.

The Philharmonic Society of London elected Antonín Dvorák an honorary member and asked if he would please create a symphony especially for them.

Emily Dickinson suffered the initial attack of her final illness. HDT WHAT? INDEX

EMILY DICKINSON EMILY DICKINSON

1885

September 5, Saturday: Perhaps it was on this day that Mrs. Helen Hunt Jackson asked to be designated Emily Dickinson’s “literary legatee & executor.”

Movember 30, Monday: Emily Dickinson’s health took a turn for the worse. HDT WHAT? INDEX

EMILY DICKINSON EMILY DICKINSON

1886

January 12, Tuesday: Emily Dickinson’s illness became more serious. HDT WHAT? INDEX

EMILY DICKINSON EMILY DICKINSON May 15, Saturday: In Amherst, Emily Dickinson died. The presence of Thomas Wentworth Higginson was requested at the funeral. Eventually, a 3 7/8" X 5 1/2" albumen photograph would be discovered which bears in pencil on the verso in a 19th-Century hand, “Emily Dickinson/Died/rec[ieved?]/1886”: HDT WHAT? INDEX

EMILY DICKINSON EMILY DICKINSON

1890

Thomas Wentworth Higginson found a publisher for, and became a co-editor with Mrs. Mabel Loomis Todd of, the 1st volume of Emily Dickinson’s poems. Then in the same year, a 2d volume of her poems was published. HDT WHAT? INDEX

EMILY DICKINSON EMILY DICKINSON

1891

Thomas Wentworth Higginson’s LIFE OF FRANCIS HIGGINSON, FIRST MINISTER IN THE MASSACHUSETTS BAY COLONY, AND AUTHOR OF “NEW ENGLAND’S PLANTATION” (1630) (New York: Dodd, Mead, and Company).

His essay “Emily Dickinson” appeared in The Atlantic Monthly.

The 1st Thoreau Society was formed. Lawrence Buell’s comment on this is: The first fictional recreation of Thoreau was by a woman, Louisa May Alcott (MOODS). The first book, to my knowledge, published by an outsider to the transcendentalist circle that celebrates nature as a refuge from hypercivilization with explicit invocation of Thoreau as model and precursor was written by a woman: Elizabeth Wright’s LICHEN TUFTS, FROM THE ALLEGHANIES (1860). The first Thoreau Society was founded by a group of young women (1891)....

According to the professor, [A]ll of Thoreau’s books except his JOURNAL entered the public domain between 1891 and 1905.

so that anyone who believed they could turn a dollar could reissue any of it which they desired to publish. HDT WHAT? INDEX

EMILY DICKINSON EMILY DICKINSON

1894

A STORY OF COURAGE, an account, written by Mrs. George Parsons Lathrop with her husband, of the Visitation convent at Georgetown.

Mabel Loomis Todd’s TOTAL ECLIPSES OF THE SUN and LETTERS OF EMILY DICKINSON 1830-1886. HDT WHAT? INDEX

EMILY DICKINSON EMILY DICKINSON

1895

August 16, Friday: William Austin Dickinson died. HDT WHAT? INDEX

EMILY DICKINSON EMILY DICKINSON

1910

John S. Harrison detected, in THE TEACHERS OF EMERSON (New York), that there was a continuity between Ralph Cudworth’s “plastic nature” and Waldo Emerson’s definition of art.

Mabel Loomis Todd’s A CYCLE OF SUNSETS and POEMS BY EMILY DICKINSON. HDT WHAT? INDEX

EMILY DICKINSON EMILY DICKINSON

1975

December: Professor Philip F. Gura’s “Thoreau and John Josselyn” (New England Quarterly, pages 505-18).

It is my contention that people tracing the sources of Thoreau’s singular literary development have overlooked influences very close to home.... Could it not be that Thoreau’s true affinity is not to people like Emerson, but to those seventeenth-century men who were, in Urian Oakes’s words, “the Lord’s Remembrancers or Recorders”?... Is it accidental that the excursion was Thoreau’s chosen form, or that he would compose a botanical index for his trips to the Maine woods?

Thomas W. Ford’s “Thoreau’s Cosmic Mosquito and Dickinson’s Terrestrial Fly” (New England Quarterly, pages 487-504). HDT WHAT? INDEX

EMILY DICKINSON EMILY DICKINSON

1998

March: Billy Collins’s PICNIC, LIGHTNING was issued by the University of Pittsburgh Press: TAKING OFF EMILY DICKINSON’S CLOTHES

First, her tippet made of tulle, easily lifted off her shoulders and laid on the back of a wooden chair. And her bonnet, the bow undone with a light forward pull. Then the long white dress, a more complicated matter with mother-of-pearl buttons down the back, so tiny and numerous that it takes forever before my hands can part the fabric, like a swimmer’s dividing water, and slip inside. You will want to know that she was standing by an open window in an upstairs bedroom, motionless, a little wide-eyed, looking out at the orchard below, the white dress puddled at her feet on the wide-board, hardwood floor. The complexity of women’s undergarments in nineteenth-century America is not to be waved off, and I proceeded like a polar explorer through clips, clasps, and moorings, catches, straps, and whalebone stays, sailing toward the iceberg of her nakedness. Later, I wrote in a notebook it was like riding a swan into the night, but, of course, I cannot tell you everything — the way she closed her eyes to the orchard, how her hair tumbled free of its pins, how there were sudden dashes whenever we spoke. What I can tell you is it was terribly quiet in Amherst that Sabbath afternoon, nothing but a carriage passing the house, a fly buzzing in a windowpane. So I could plainly hear her inhale when I undid the very top hook-and-eye fastener of her corset and I could hear her sigh when finally it was unloosed, the way some readers sigh when they realize that Hope has feathers, that reason is a plank, that life is a loaded gun that looks right at you with a yellow eye. HDT WHAT? INDEX

EMILY DICKINSON EMILY DICKINSON

2000

April 21, Friday: It was announced that Philip F. Gura had purchased a 3 7/8" X 5 1/2" albumen photograph which originally was mounted on photographer’s board and is identified in pencil on the verso in a 19th-Century hand, “Emily Dickinson/Died/rec[ieved?]/1886,” 1886 being in fact the year in which Emily had died. Around her neck on a lanyard is what appears to be a pair of dark glasses of the sort that was used in that time period to protect delicate eyes. These glasses would date the image to 1864-1865, when she was being treated by an ophthalmologist in the Cambridge/Boston area, Dr. Henry W. Williams. This would have been taken, that is, while she was at the height of her creative powers. Comparing this with the authenticated Daguerreotype we have of her as a teenager, there are similarities in eyes, nose, mouth, and slope of shoulders: HDT WHAT? INDEX

EMILY DICKINSON EMILY DICKINSON

2001

Alfred Habegger’s biography of Emily Dickinson, MY WARS ARE LAID AWAY IN BOOKS has it that she “came to admire” Thoreau very much, and in 1871 wrote a poem as much about herself as about him: ’Twas fighting for his Life he was— That sort accomplish well— The Ordnance of Vitality Is frugal of its Ball. It aims once—kills once—conquers once— There is no second War In that Campaign inscrutable Of the Interior. HDT WHAT? INDEX

EMILY DICKINSON EMILY DICKINSON COPYRIGHT NOTICE: In addition to the property of others, such as extensive quotations and reproductions of images, this “read-only” computer file contains a great deal of special work product of Austin Meredith, copyright 2017. Access to these interim materials will eventually be offered for a fee in order to recoup some of the costs of preparation. My hypercontext button invention which, instead of creating a hypertext leap through hyperspace —resulting in navigation problems— allows for an utter alteration of the context within which one is experiencing a specific content already being viewed, is claimed as proprietary to Austin Meredith — and therefore freely available for use by all. Limited permission to copy such files, or any material from such files, must be obtained in advance in writing from the “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project, 833 Berkeley St., Durham NC 27705. Please contact the project at .

“It’s all now you see. Yesterday won’t be over until tomorrow and tomorrow began ten thousand years ago.” – Remark by character “Garin Stevens” in William Faulkner’s INTRUDER IN THE DUST

Prepared: June 26, 2017 HDT WHAT? INDEX

EMILY DICKINSON EMILY DICKINSON ARRGH AUTOMATED RESEARCH REPORT

GENERATION HOTLINE

This stuff presumably looks to you as if it were generated by a human. Such is not the case. Instead, someone has requested that we pull it out of the hat of a pirate who has grown out of the shoulder of our pet parrot “Laura” (as above). What these chronological lists are: they are research reports compiled by ARRGH algorithms out of a database of modules which we term the Kouroo Contexture (this is data mining). To respond to such a request for information we merely push a button.

Commonly, the first output of the algorithm has obvious deficiencies and we need to go back into the modules stored in HDT WHAT? INDEX

EMILY DICKINSON EMILY DICKINSON the contexture and do a minor amount of tweaking, and then we need to punch that button again and recompile the chronology — but there is nothing here that remotely resembles the ordinary “writerly” process you know and love. As the contents of this originating contexture improve, and as the programming improves, and as funding becomes available (to date no funding whatever has been needed in the creation of this facility, the entire operation being run out of pocket change) we expect a diminished need to do such tweaking and recompiling, and we fully expect to achieve a simulation of a generous and untiring robotic research librarian. Onward and upward in this brave new world.

First come first serve. There is no charge. Place requests with . Arrgh. HDT WHAT? INDEX

EMILY DICKINSON EMILY DICKINSON POEMS BY EMILY DICKINSON

BOOK I.

LIFE.

I. Real Riches.

’T is little I could care for pearls Who own the ample sea; Or brooches, when the Emperor With rubies pelteth me; Or gold, who am the Prince of Mines; Or diamonds, when I see A diadem to fit a dome Continual crowning me.

II. Superiority to Fate.

Superiority to fate Is difficult to learn. ’T is not conferred by any, But possible to earn A pittance at a time, Until, to her surprise, The soul with strict economy Subsists till Paradise.

III. Hope.

Hope is a subtle glutton; He feeds upon the fair; And yet, inspected closely, What abstinence is there! His is the halcyon table That never seats but one, And whatsoever is consumed The same amounts remain.

IV. Forbidden Fruit.

I. Forbidden fruit a flavor has That lawful orchards mocks; How luscious lies the pea within The pod that Duty locks! HDT WHAT? INDEX

EMILY DICKINSON EMILY DICKINSON V. Forbidden Fruit.

II. Heaven is what I cannot reach! The apple on the tree, Provided it do hopeless hang, That ‘heaven’ is, to me. The color on the cruising cloud, The interdicted ground Behind the hill, the house behind,— There Paradise is found!

VI. A Word.

A word is dead When it is said, Some say. I say it just Begins to live That day.

VII.

To venerate the simple days Which lead the seasons by, Needs but to remember That from you or me They may take the trifle Termed mortality! To invest existence with a stately air, Needs but to remember That the acorn there Is the egg of forests For the upper air!

VIII. Life’s Trades.

It ’s such a little thing to weep, So short a thing to sigh; And yet by trades the size of these We men and women die!

IX.

Drowning is not so pitiful As the attempt to rise. Three times, ’t is said, a sinking man Comes up to face the skies, And then declines forever To that abhorred abode Where hope and he part company,— For he is grasped of God. The Maker’s cordial visage, However good to see, Is shunned, we must admit it, Like an adversity.

X.

How still the bells in steeples stand, Till, swollen with the sky, They leap upon their silver feet In frantic melody! HDT WHAT? INDEX

EMILY DICKINSON EMILY DICKINSON XI.

If the foolish call them ‘flowers,’ Need the wiser tell? If the savans ‘classify’ them, It is just as well! Those who read the Revelations Must not criticise Those who read the same edition With beclouded eyes! Could we stand with that old Moses Canaan denied,— Scan, like him, the stately landscape On the other side,— Doubtless we should deem superfluous Many sciences Not pursued by learnèd angels In scholastic skies! Low amid that glad Belles lettres Grant that we may stand, Stars, amid profound Galaxies, At that grand ‘Right hand’!

XII. A Syllable.

Could mortal lip divine The undeveloped freight Of a delivered syllable, ’T would crumble with the weight.

XIII. Parting.

My life closed twice before its close; It yet remains to see If Immortality unveil A third event to me, So huge, so hopeless to conceive, As these that twice befell. Parting is all we know of heaven, And all we need of hell.

XIV. Aspiration.

We never know how high we are Till we are called to rise; And then, if we are true to plan, Our statures touch the skies. The heroism we recite Would be a daily thing, Did not ourselves the cubits warp For fear to be a king. HDT WHAT? INDEX

EMILY DICKINSON EMILY DICKINSON XV. The Inevitable.

While I was fearing it, it came, But came with less of fear, Because that fearing it so long Had almost made it dear. There is a fitting a dismay, A fitting a despair. ’T is harder knowing it is due, Than knowing it is here. The trying on the utmost, The morning it is new, Is terribler than wearing it A whole existence through.

XVI. A Book.

There is no frigate like a book To take us lands away, Nor any coursers like a page Of prancing poetry. This traverse may the poorest take Without oppress of toll; How frugal is the chariot That bears a human soul!

XVII.

Who has not found the heaven below Will fail of it above. God’s residence is next to mine, His furniture is love.

XVIII. A Portrait.

A face devoid of love or grace, A hateful, hard, successful face, A face with which a stone Would feel as thoroughly at ease As were they old acquaintances,— First time together thrown. HDT WHAT? INDEX

EMILY DICKINSON EMILY DICKINSON XIX. I Had a Guinea Golden.

I had a guinea golden; I lost it in the sand, And though the sum was simple, And pounds were in the land, Still had it such a value Unto my frugal eye, That when I could not find it I sat me down to sigh. I had a crimson robin Who sang full many a day, But when the woods were painted He, too, did fly away. Time brought me other robins,— Their ballads were the same,— Still for my missing troubadour I kept the ‘house at hame.’ I had a star in heaven; One Pleiad was its name, And when I was not heeding It wandered from the same. And though the skies are crowded, And all the night ashine, I do not care about it, Since none of them are mine. My story has a moral: I have a missing friend,— Pleiad its name, and robin, And guinea in the sand,— And when this mournful ditty, Accompanied with tear, Shall meet the eye of traitor In country far from here, Grant that repentance solemn May seize upon his mind, And he no consolation Beneath the sun may find. Note.—This poem may have had, like many others, a personal origin. It is more than probable that it was sent to some friend travelling in Europe, a dainty reminder of letter-writing delinquencies.

XX. Saturday Afternoon.

From all the jails the boys and girls Ecstatically leap,— Beloved, only afternoon That prison does n’t keep. They storm the earth and stun the air, A mob of solid bliss. Alas! that frowns could lie in wait For such a foe as this!

XXI.

Few get enough,—enough is one; To that ethereal throng Have not each one of us the right To stealthily belong? HDT WHAT? INDEX

EMILY DICKINSON EMILY DICKINSON XXII.

Upon the gallows hung a wretch, Too sullied for the hell To which the law entitled him. As nature’s curtain fell The one who bore him tottered in, For this was woman’s son. ’’T was all I had,’ she stricken gasped; Oh, what a livid boon!

XXIII. The Lost Thought.

I felt a clearing in my mind As if my brain had split; I tried to match it, seam by seam, But could not make them fit. The thought behind I strove to join Unto the thought before, But sequence ravelled out of reach Like balls upon a floor.

XXIV. Reticence.

The reticent volcano keeps His never slumbering plan; Confided are his projects pink To no precarious man. If nature will not tell the tale Jehovah told to her, Can human nature not survive Without a listener? Admonished by her buckled lips Let every babbler be. The only secret people keep Is Immortality.

XXV. With Flowers.

If recollecting were forgetting, Then I remember not; And if forgetting, recollecting, How near I had forgot! And if to miss were merry, And if to mourn were gay, How very blithe the fingers That gathered these to-day! HDT WHAT? INDEX

EMILY DICKINSON EMILY DICKINSON XXVI.

The farthest thunder that I heard Was nearer than the sky, And rumbles still, though torrid noons Have lain their missiles by. The lightning that preceded it Struck no one but myself, But I would not exchange the bolt For all the rest of life. Indebtedness to oxygen The chemist may repay, But not the obligation To electricity. It founds the homes and decks the days, And every clamor bright Is but the gleam concomitant Of that waylaying light. The thought is quiet as a flake,— A crash without a sound; How life’s reverberation Its explanation found!

XXVII.

On the bleakness of my lot Bloom I strove to raise. Late, my acre of a rock Yielded grape and maize. Soil of flint if steadfast tilled Will reward the hand; Seed of palm by Lybian sun Fructified in sand.

XXVIII. Contrast.

A door just opened on a street— I, lost, was passing by— And instant’s width of warmth disclosed, And wealth, and company. The door as sudden shut, and I, I, lost, was passing by,— Lost doubly, but by contrast most, Enlightening misery.

XXIX. Friends.

Are friends delight or pain? Could bounty but remain Riches were good. But if they only stay Bolder to fly away, Riches are sad.

XXX. Fire.

Ashes denote that fire was; Respect the grayest pile For the departed creature’s sake That hovered there awhile. Fire exists the first in light, And then consolidates,— Only the chemist can disclose Into what carbonates. HDT WHAT? INDEX

EMILY DICKINSON EMILY DICKINSON XXXI. A Man.

Fate slew him, but he did not drop; She felled—he did not fall— Impaled him on her fiercest stakes— He neutralized them all. She stung him, sapped his firm advance, But, when her worst was done, And he, unmoved, regarded her, Acknowledged him a man.

XXXII. Ventures.

Finite to fail, but infinite to venture. For the one ship that struts the shore Many ’s the gallant, overwhelmed creature Nodding in navies nevermore.

XXXIII. Griefs.

I measure every grief I meet With analytic eyes; I wonder if it weighs like mine, Or has an easier size. I wonder if they bore it long, Or did it just begin? I could not tell the date of mine, It feels so old a pain. I wonder if it hurts to live, And if they have to try, And whether, could they choose between, They would not rather die. I wonder if when years have piled— Some thousands—on the cause Of early hurt, if such a lapse Could give them any pause; Or would they go on aching still Through centuries above, Enlightened to a larger pain By contrast with the love. The grieved are many, I am told; The reason deeper lies,— Death is but one and comes but once, And only nails the eyes. There ’s grief of want, and grief of cold,— A sort they call ‘despair;’ There ’s banishment from native eyes, In sight of native air. And though I may not guess the kind Correctly, yet to me A piercing comfort it affords In passing Calvary, To note the fashions of the cross, Of those that stand alone, Still fascinated to presume That some are like my own. HDT WHAT? INDEX

EMILY DICKINSON EMILY DICKINSON XXXIV.

I have a king who does not speak; So, wondering, thro’ the hours meek I trudge the day away,— Half glad when it is night and sleep, If, haply, thro’ a dream to peep In parlors shut by day. And if I do, when morning comes, It is as if a hundred drums Did round my pillow roll, And shouts fill all my childish sky, And bells keep saying ‘victory’ From steeples in my soul! And if I don’t, the little Bird Within the Orchard is not heard, And I omit to pray, ’Father, thy will be done’ to-day, For my will goes the other way, And it were perjury!

XXXV. Disenchantment.

It dropped so low in my regard I heard it hit the ground, And go to pieces on the stones At bottom of my mind; Yet blamed the fate that fractured, less Than I reviled myself For entertaining plated wares Upon my silver shelf.

XXXVI. Lost Faith.

To lose one’s faith surpasses The loss of an estate, Because estates can be Replenished,—faith cannot. Inherited with life, Belief but once can be; Annihilate a single clause, And Being’s beggary.

XXXVII. Lost Joy.

I had a daily bliss I half indifferent viewed, Till sudden I perceived it stir,— It grew as I pursued, Till when, around a crag, It wasted from my sight, Enlarged beyond my utmost scope, I learned its sweetness right.

XXXVIII.

I worked for chaff, and earning wheat Was haughty and betrayed. What right had fields to arbitrate In matters ratified? I tasted wheat,—and hated chaff, And thanked the ample friend; Wisdom is more becoming viewed At distance than at hand. HDT WHAT? INDEX

EMILY DICKINSON EMILY DICKINSON XXXIX.

Life, and Death, and Giants Such as these, are still. Minor apparatus, hopper of the mill, Beetle at the candle, Or a fife’s small fame, Maintain by accident That they proclaim.

XL. Alpine Glow.

Our lives are Swiss,— So still, so cool, Till, some odd afternoon, The Alps neglect their curtains, And we look farther on. Italy stands the other side, While, like a guard between, The solemn Alps, The siren Alps, Forever intervene!

XLI. Remembrance.

Remembrance has a rear and front,— ’T is something like a house; It has a garret also For refuse and the mouse, Besides, the deepest cellar That ever mason hewed; Look to it, by its fathoms Ourselves be not pursued.

XLII.

To hang our head ostensibly, And subsequent to find That such was not the posture Of our immortal mind, Affords the sly presumption That, in so dense a fuzz, You, too, take cobweb attitudes Upon a plane of gauze!

XLIII. The Brain.

The brain is wider than the sky, For, put them side by side, The one the other will include With ease, and you beside. The brain is deeper than the sea, For, hold them, blue to blue, The one the other will absorb, As sponges, buckets do. The brain is just the weight of God, For, lift them, pound for pound, And they will differ, if they do, As syllable from sound. HDT WHAT? INDEX

EMILY DICKINSON EMILY DICKINSON XLIV.

The bone that has no marrow; What ultimate for that? It is not fit for table, For beggar, or for cat. A bone has obligations, A being has the same; A marrowless assembly Is culpabler than shame. But how shall finished creatures A function fresh obtain?— Old Nicodemus’ phantom Confronting us again!

XLV. The Past.

The past is such a curious creature, To look her in the face A transport may reward us, Or a disgrace. Unarmed if any meet her, I charge him, fly! Her rusty ammunition Might yet reply!

XLVI.

To help our bleaker parts Salubrious hours are given, Which if they do not fit for earth Drill silently for heaven.

XLVII.

What soft, cherubic creatures These gentlewomen are! One would as soon assault a plush Or violate a star. Such dimity convictions, A horror so refined Of freckled human nature, Of Deity ashamed,— It ’s such a common glory, A fisherman’s degree! Redemption, brittle lady, Be so, ashamed of thee.

XLVIII. Desire.

Who never wanted,—maddest joy Remains to him unknown; The banquet of abstemiousness Surpasses that of wine. Within its hope, though yet ungrasped Desire’s perfect goal, No nearer, lest reality Should disenthrall thy soul. HDT WHAT? INDEX

EMILY DICKINSON EMILY DICKINSON XLIX. Philosophy.

It might be easier To fail with land in sight, Than gain my blue peninsula To perish of delight.

L. Power.

You cannot put a fire out; A thing that can ignite Can go, itself, without a fan Upon the slowest night. You cannot fold a flood And put it in a drawer,— Because the winds would find it out, And tell your cedar floor.

LI.

A modest lot, a fame petite, A brief campaign of sting and sweet Is plenty! Is enough! A sailor’s business is the shore, A soldier’s—balls. Who asketh more Must seek the neighboring life!

LII.

Is bliss, then, such abyss I must not put my foot amiss For fear I spoil my shoe? I ’d rather suit my foot Than save my boot, For yet to buy another pair Is possible At any fair. But bliss is sold just once; The patent lost None buy it any more.

LIII. Experience.

I stepped from plank to plank So slow and cautiously; The stars about my head I felt, About my feet the sea. I knew not but the next Would be my final inch,— This gave me that precarious gait Some call experience. HDT WHAT? INDEX

EMILY DICKINSON EMILY DICKINSON LIV. Thanksgiving Day.

One day is there of the series Termed Thanksgiving day, Celebrated part at table, Part in memory. Neither patriarch nor pussy, I dissect the play; Seems it, to my hooded thinking, Reflex holiday. Had there been no sharp subtraction From the early sum, Not an acre or a caption Where was once a room, Not a mention, whose small pebble Wrinkled any bay,— Unto such, were such assembly, ’T were Thanksgiving day.

LV. Childish Griefs.

Softened by Time’s consummate plush, How sleek the woe appears That threatened childhood’s citadel And undermined the years! Bisected now by bleaker griefs, We envy the despair That devastated childhood’s realm, So easy to repair. HDT WHAT? INDEX

EMILY DICKINSON EMILY DICKINSON BOOK II.

LOVE.

I. Consecration.

Proud of my broken heart since thou didst break it, Proud of the pain I did not feel till thee, Proud of my night since thou with moons dost slake it, Not to partake thy passion, my humility. II. Love’s Humility. My worthiness is all my doubt, His merit all my fear, Contrasting which, my qualities Do lowlier appear; Let I should insufficient prove For his beloved need, The chiefest apprehension Within my loving creed. So I, the undivine abode Of his elect content, Conform my soul as ’t were a church Unto her sacrament. III. Love. Love is anterior to life, Posterior to death, Initial of creation, and The exponent of breath.

IV. Satisfied.

One blessing had I, than the rest So larger to my eyes That I stopped gauging, satisfied, For this enchanted size. It was the limit of my dream, The focus of my prayer,— A perfect, paralyzing bliss Contented as despair. I knew no more of want or cold, Phantasms both become, For this new value in the soul, Supremest earthly sum. The heaven below the heaven above Obscured with ruddier hue. Life’s latitude leant over-full; The judgment perished, too. Why joys so scantily disburse, Why Paradise defer, Why floods are served to us in bowls,— I speculate no more. HDT WHAT? INDEX

EMILY DICKINSON EMILY DICKINSON V. With a Flower.

When roses cease to bloom, dear, And violets are done, When bumble-bees in solemn flight Have passed beyond the sun, The hand that paused to gather Upon this summer’s day Will idle lie, in Auburn,— Then take my flower, pray!

VI. Song.

Summer for thee grant I may be When summer days are flown! Thy music still when whippoorwill And oriole are done! For thee to bloom, I ’ll skip the tomb And sow my blossoms o’er! Pray gather me, Anemone, Thy flower forevermore!

VII. Loyalty.

Split the lark and you ’ll find the music, Bulb after bulb, in silver rolled, Scantily dealt to the summer morning, Saved for your ear when lutes be old. Loose the flood, you shall find it patent, Gush after gush, reserved for you; Scarlet experiment! sceptic Thomas, Now, do you doubt that your bird was true?

VIII.

To lose thee, sweeter than to gain All other hearts I knew. ’T is true the drought is destitute, But then I had the dew! The Caspian has its realms of sand, Its other realm of sea; Without the sterile perquisite No Caspian could be.

IX.

Poor little heart! Did they forget thee? Then dinna care! Then dinna care! Proud little heart! Did they forsake thee? Be debonair! Be debonair! Frail little heart! I would not break thee: Could’st credit me? Could’st credit me? Gay little heart! Like morning glory Thou ’ll wilted be; thou ’ll wilted be! HDT WHAT? INDEX

EMILY DICKINSON EMILY DICKINSON X. Forgotten.

There is a word Which bears a sword Can pierce an armed man. It hurls its barbed syllables,— At once is mute again. But where it fell The saved will tell On patriotic day, Some epauletted brother Gave his breath away. Wherever runs the breathless sun, Wherever roams the day, There is its noiseless onset, There is its victory! Behold the keenest marksman! The most accomplished shot! Time’s sublimest target Is a soul ‘forgot’!

XI.

I ’ve got an arrow here; Loving the hand that sent it, I the dart revere. Fell, they will say, in ‘skirmish’! Vanquished, my soul will know, By but a simple arrow Sped by an archer’s bow.

XII. The Master.

He fumbles at your spirit As players at the keys Before they drop full music on; He stuns you by degrees, Prepares your brittle substance For the ethereal blow, By fainter hammers, further heard, Then nearer, then so slow Your breath has time to straighten, Your brain to bubble cool,— Deals one imperial thunderbolt That scalps your naked soul.

XIII.

Heart, we will forget him! You and I, to-night! You may forget the warmth he gave, I will forget the light. When you have done, pray tell me, That I my thoughts may dim; Haste! lest while you ’re lagging, I may remember him! HDT WHAT? INDEX

EMILY DICKINSON EMILY DICKINSON XIV.

Father, I bring thee not myself,— That were the little load; I bring thee the imperial heart I had not strength to hold. The heart I cherished in my own Till mine too heavy grew, Yet strangest, heavier since it went, Is it too large for you?

XV.

We outgrow love, like other things And put it in the drawer, Till it an antique fashion shows Like costumes grandsires wore.

XVI.

Not with a club the heart is broken Nor with a stone; A whip so small you could not see it I ’ve known To lash the magic creature Till it fell, Yet that whip’s name Too noble then to tell. Magnanimous as bird By boy descried, Singing unto the stone Of which it died; Shame need not crouch In such an earth as ours— Stand—stand erect; The universe is yours.

XVII. Who?

My friend must be a bird, Because it flies! Mortal my friend must be, Because it dies! Barbs has it, like a bee. Ah, curious friend, Thou puzzlest me!

XVIII.

He touched me, so I live to know That such a day, permitted so, I groped upon his breast. It was a boundless place to me, And silenced, as the awful sea Puts minor streams to rest. And now, I ’m different from before, As if I breathed superior air, Or brushed a royal gown; My fee, too, that had wandered so, My gypsy face transfigured now To tenderer renown. HDT WHAT? INDEX

EMILY DICKINSON EMILY DICKINSON XIX. Dreams.

Let me not mar that perfect dream By an auroral stain, But so adjust my daily night That it will come again.

XX. Numen Lumen.

I live with him, I see his face; I go no more away For visitor, or sundown; Death’s single privacy, The only one forestalling mine, And that by right that he Presents a claim invisible, No wedlock granted me. I live with him, I hear his voice, I stand alive to-day To witness to the certainty Of immortality Taught me by Time,—the lower way, Conviction every day,— That life like this is endless, Be judgment what it may.

XXI. Longing.

I envy seas whereon he rides, I envy spokes of wheels Of chariots that him convey, I envy speechless hills That gaze upon his journey; How easy all can see What is forbidden utterly As heaven, unto me! I envy nests of sparrows That dot his distant eaves, The wealthy fly upon his pane, The happy, happy leaves That just abroad his window Have summer’s leave to be, The earrings of Pizarro Could not obtain for me. I envy light that wakes him, And bells that boldly ring To tell him it is noon abroad,— Myself his noon could bring, Yet interdict my blossom And abrogate my bee, Lest noon in everlasting night Drop Gabriel and me.

XXII. Wedded.

A solemn thing it was, I said, A woman white to be, And wear, if God should count me fit, Her hallowed mystery. A timid thing to drop a life Into the purple well, Too plummetless that it come back Eternity until. HDT WHAT? INDEX

EMILY DICKINSON EMILY DICKINSON BOOK III.

NATURE.

I. Nature’s Changes.

The springtime’s pallid landscape Will glow like bright bouquet, Though drifted deep in parian The village lies to-day. The lilacs, bending many a year, With purple load will hang; The bees will not forget the tune Their old forefathers sang. The rose will redden in the bog, The aster on the hill Her everlasting fashion set, And covenant gentians frill, Till summer folds her miracle As women do their gown, Or priests adjust the symbols When sacrament is done.

II. Tulip.

She slept beneath a tree Remembered but by me. I touched her cradle mute; She recognized the foot, Put on her carmine suit,— And see!

III.

A light exists in spring Not present on the year At any other period. When March is scarcely here A color stands abroad On solitary hills That science cannot overtake, But human nature feels. It waits upon the lawn; It shows the furthest tree Upon the furthest slope we know; It almost speaks to me. Then, as horizons step, Or noons report away, Without the formula of sound, It passes, and we stay: A quality of loss Affecting our content, As trade had suddenly encroached Upon a sacrament. HDT WHAT? INDEX

EMILY DICKINSON EMILY DICKINSON IV. The Waking Year.

A lady red upon the hill Her annual secret keeps; A lady white within the field In placid lily sleeps! The tidy breezes with their brooms Sweep vale, and hill, and tree! Prithee, my pretty housewives! Who may expected be? The neighbors do not yet suspect! The woods exchange a smile— Orchard, and buttercup, and bird— In such a little while! And yet how still the landscape stands, How nonchalant the wood, As if the resurrection Were nothing very odd!

V. To March.

Dear March, come in! How glad I am! I looked for you before. Put down your hat— You must have walked— How out of breath you are! Dear March, how are you? And the rest? Did you leave Nature well? Oh, March, come right upstairs with me, I have so much to tell! I got your letter, and the birds’; The maples never knew That you were coming,—I declare, How red their faces grew! But, March, forgive me— And all those hills You left for me to hue; There was no purple suitable, You took it all with you. Who knocks? That April! Lock the door! I will not be pursued! He stayed away a year, to call When I am occupied. But trifles look so trivial As soon as you have come, That blame is just as dear as praise And praise as mere as blame.

VI. March.

We like March, his shoes are purple, He is new and high; Makes he mud for dog and peddler, Makes he forest dry; Knows the adder’s tongue his coming, And begets her spot. Stands the sun so close and mighty That our minds are hot. News is he of all the others; Bold it were to die With the blue-birds buccaneering On his British sky. HDT WHAT? INDEX

EMILY DICKINSON EMILY DICKINSON VII. Dawn.

Not knowing when the dawn will come I open every door; Or has it feathers like a bird, Or billows like a shore?

VIII.

A murmur in the trees to note, Not loud enough for wind; A star not far enough to seek, Nor near enough to find; A long, long yellow on the lawn, A hubbub as of feet; Not audible, as ours to us, But dapperer, more sweet; A hurrying home of little men To houses unperceived,— All this, and more, if I should tell, Would never be believed. Of robins in the trundle bed How many I espy Whose nightgowns could not hide the wings, Although I heard them try! But then I promised ne’er to tell; How could I break my word? So go your way and I ’ll go mine,— No fear you ’ll miss the road.

IX.

Morning is the place for dew, Corn is made at noon, After dinner light for flowers, Dukes for setting sun!

X.

To my quick ear the leaves conferred; The bushes they were bells; I could not find a privacy From Nature’s sentinels. In cave if I presumed to hide, The walls began to tell; Creation seemed a mighty crack To make me visible.

XI. A Rose.

A sepal, petal, and a thorn Upon a common summer’s morn, A flash of dew, a bee or two, A breeze A caper in the trees,— And I ’m a rose! HDT WHAT? INDEX

EMILY DICKINSON EMILY DICKINSON XII.

High from the earth I heard a bird; He trod upon the trees As he esteemed them trifles, And then he spied a breeze, And situated softly Upon a pile of wind Which in a perturbation Nature had left behind. A joyous-going fellow I gathered from his talk, Which both of benediction And badinage partook, Without apparent burden, I learned, in leafy wood He was the faithful father Of a dependent brood; And this untoward transport His remedy for care,— A contrast to our respites. How different we are!

XIII. Cobwebs.

The spider as an artist Has never been employed Though his surpassing merit Is freely certified By every broom and Bridget Throughout a Christian land. Neglected son of genius, I take thee by the hand.

XIV. A Well.

What mystery pervades a well! The water lives so far, Like neighbor from another world Residing in a jar. The grass does not appear afraid; I often wonder he Can stand so close and look so bold At what is dread to me. Related somehow they may be,— The sedge stands next the sea, Where he is floorless, yet of fear No evidence gives he. But nature is a stranger yet; The ones that cite her most Have never passed her haunted house, Nor simplified her ghost. To pity those that know her not Is helped by the regret That those who know her, know her less The nearer her they get.

XV.

To make a prairie it takes a clover and one bee,— One clover, and a bee, And revery. The revery alone will do If bees are few. HDT WHAT? INDEX

EMILY DICKINSON EMILY DICKINSON XVI. The Wind.

It ’s like the light,— A fashionless delight It ’s like the bee,— A dateless melody. It ’s like the woods, Private like breeze, Phraseless, yet it stirs The proudest trees. It ’s like the morning,— Best when it ’s done,— The everlasting clocks Chime noon.

XVII.

A dew sufficed itself And satisfied a leaf, And felt, ‘how vast a destiny! How trivial is life!’ The sun went out to work, The day went out to play, But not again that dew was seen By physiognomy. Whether by day abducted, Or emptied by the sun Into the sea, in passing, Eternally unknown.

XVIII. The Woodpecker.

His bill an auger is, His head, a cap and frill. He laboreth at every tree,— A worm his utmost goal.

XIX. A Snake.

Sweet is the swamp with its secrets, Until we meet a snake; ’Tis then we sigh for houses, And our departure take At that enthralling gallop That only childhood knows. A snake is summer’s treason, And guile is where it goes. HDT WHAT? INDEX

EMILY DICKINSON EMILY DICKINSON XX.

Could I but ride indefinite, As doth the meadow-bee, And visit only where I liked, And no man visit me, And flirt all day with buttercups, And marry whom I may, And dwell a little everywhere, Or better, run away With no police to follow, Or chase me if I do, Till I should jump peninsulas To get away from you,— I said, but just to be a bee Upon a raft of air, And row in nowhere all day long, And anchor off the bar,— What liberty! So captives deem Who tight in dungeons are.

XXI. The Moon.

The moon was but a chin of gold A night or two ago, And now she turns her perfect face Upon the world below. Her forehead is of amplest blond; Her cheek like beryl stone; Her eye unto the summer dew The likest I have known. Her lips of amber never part; But what must be the smile Upon her friend she could bestow Were such her silver will! And what a privilege to be But the remotest star! For certainly her way might pass Beside your twinkling door. Her bonnet is the firmament, The universe her shoe, The stars the trinkets at her belt, Her dimities of blue.

XXII. The Bat.

The bat is dun with wrinkled wings Like fallow article, And not a song pervades his lips, Or none perceptible. His small umbrella, quaintly halved, Describing in the air An arc alike inscrutable,— Elate philosopher! Deputed from what firmament Of what astute abode, Empowered with what malevolence Auspiciously withheld. To his adroit Creator Ascribe no less the praise; Beneficent, believe me, His eccentricities. HDT WHAT? INDEX

EMILY DICKINSON EMILY DICKINSON XXIII. The Balloon.

You’ve seen balloons set, have n’t you? So stately they ascend It is as swans discarded you For duties diamond. Their liquid feet go softly out Upon a sea of blond; They spurn the air as ’t were too mean For creatures so renowned. Their ribbons just beyond the eye, They struggle some for breath, And yet the crowd applauds below; They would not encore death. The gilded creature strains and spins, Trips frantic in a tree, Tears open her imperial veins And tumbles in the sea. The crowd retire with an oath The dust in streets goes down, And clerks in counting-rooms observe, ‘T was only a balloon.’

XXIV. Evening.

The cricket sang, And set the sun, And workmen finished, one by one, Their seam the day upon. The low grass loaded with the dew, The twilight stood as strangers do With hat in hand, polite and new, To stay as if, or go. A vastness, as a neighbor, came,— A wisdom without face or name, A peace, as hemispheres at home,— And so the night became.

XXV. Cocoon.

Drab habitation of whom? Tabernacle or tomb, Or dome of worm, Or porch of gnome, Or some elf’s catacomb?

XXVI. Sunset.

A sloop of amber slips away Upon an ether sea, And wrecks in peace a purple tar, The son of ecstasy. HDT WHAT? INDEX

EMILY DICKINSON EMILY DICKINSON XXVII. Aurora.

Of bronze and blaze The north, to-night! So adequate its forms, So preconcerted with itself, So distant to alarms,— An unconcern so sovereign To universe, or me, It paints my simple spirit With tints of majesty, Till I take vaster attitudes, And strut upon my stem, Disdaining men and oxygen, For arrogance of them. My splendors are menagerie; But their competeness show Will entertain the centuries When I am, long ago, An island in dishonored grass, Whom none but daisies know.

XXVIII. The Coming of Night.

How the old mountains drip with sunset, And the brake of dun! How the hemlocks are tipped in tinsel By the wizard sun! How the old steeples hand the scarlet, Till the ball is full,— Have I the lip of the flamingo That I dare to tell? Then, how the fire ebbs like billows, Touching all the grass With a departing, sapphire feature, As if a duchess pass! How a small dusk crawls on the village Till the houses blot; And the odd flambeaux no men carry Glimmer on the spot! Now it is night in nest and kennel, And where was the wood, Just a dome of abyss is nodding Into solitude!— These are the visions baffled Guido; Titian never told; Domenichino dropped the pencil, Powerless to unfold.

XXIX. Aftermath.

The murmuring of bees has ceased; But murmuring of some Posterior, prophetic, Has simultaneous come,— The lower metres of the year, When nature’s laugh is done,— The Revelations of the book Whose Genesis is June. HDT WHAT? INDEX

EMILY DICKINSON EMILY DICKINSON BOOK IV

TIME AND ETERNITY

I.

This world is not conclusion; A sequel stands beyond, Invisible, as music, But positive, as sound. It beckons and it baffles; Philosophies don’t know, And through a riddle, at the last, Sagacity must go. To guess it puzzles scholars; To gain it, men have shown Contempt of generations, And crucifixion known.

II.

We learn in the retreating How vast an one Was recently among us. A perished sun Endears in the departure How doubly more Than all the golden presence It was before!

III.

They say that ‘time assuages,’— Time never did assuage; An actual suffering strengthens, As sinews do, with age. Time is a test of trouble, But not a remedy. If such it prove, it prove too There was no malady.

IV.

We cover thee, sweet face. Not that we tire of thee, But that thyself fatigue of us; Remember, as thou flee, We follow thee until Thou notice us no more, And then, reluctant, turn away To con thee o’er and o’er, And blame the scanty love We were content to show, Augmented, sweet, a hundred fold If thou would’st take it now. HDT WHAT? INDEX

EMILY DICKINSON EMILY DICKINSON V. Ending.

That is solemn we have ended,— Be it but a play, Or a glee among the garrets, Or a holiday, Or a leaving home; or later, Parting with a world We have understood, for better Still it be unfurled.

VI.

The stimulus, beyond the grave His countenance to see, Supports me like imperial drams Afforded royally.

VII.

Given in marriage unto thee, Oh, thou celestial host! Bride of the Father and the Son, Bride of the Holy Ghost! Other betrothal shall dissolve, Wedlock of will decay; Only the keeper of this seal Conquers mortality.

VIII.

That such have died enables us The tranquiller to die; That such have lived, certificate For immortality.

IX.

They won’t frown always,—some sweet day When I forget to tease, They ’ll recollect how cold I looked, And how I just said ‘please.’ Then they will hasten to the door To call the little child, Who cannot thank them, for the ice That on her lisping piled.

X. Immortality.

It is an honorable thought, And makes one lift one’s hat, As one encountered gentlefolk Upon a daily street, That we ’ve immortal place, Though pyramids decay, And kingdoms, like the orchard, Flit russetly away. HDT WHAT? INDEX

EMILY DICKINSON EMILY DICKINSON XI.

The distance that the dead have gone Does not at first appear; Their coming back seems possible For many an ardent year. And then, that we have followed them We more than half suspect, So intimate have we become With their dear retrospect.

XII.

How dare the robins sing, When men and women hear Who since they went to their account Have settled with the year!— Paid all that life had earned In one consummate bill, And now, what life or death can do Is immaterial. Insulting is the sun To him whose mortal light, Beguiled of immortality, Bequeaths him to the night. In deference to him Extinct be every hum, Whose garden wrestles with the dew, At daybreak overcome!

XIII. Death.

Death is like the insect Menacing the tree, Competent to kill it, But decoyed may be. Bait it with the balsam, Seek it with the knife, Baffle, if it cost you Everything in life. Then, if it have burrowed Out of reach of skill, Ring the tree and leave it,— ’T is the vermin’s will.

XIV. Unwarned.

’T is sunrise, little maid, hast thou No station in the day? ’T was not thy wont to hinder so,— Retrieve thine industry. ’T is noon, my little maid, alas! And art thou sleeping yet? The lily waiting to be wed, The bee, dost thou forget? My little maid, ’t is night; alas, That night should be to thee Instead of morning! Hadst thou broached Thy little plan to me, Dissuade thee if I could not, sweet, I might have aided thee. HDT WHAT? INDEX

EMILY DICKINSON EMILY DICKINSON XV.

Each that we lose takes part of us; A crescent still abides, Which like the moon, some turbid night, Is summoned by the tides.

XVI.

Not any higher stands the grave For heroes than for men; Not any nearer for the child Than numb three-score and ten. This latest leisure equal lulls The beggar and his queen; Propitiate this democrat By summer’s gracious mien.

XVII. Asleep.

As far from pity as complaint, As cool to speech as stone, As numb to revelation As if my trade were bone. As far from time as history, As near yourself to-day As children to the rainbow’s scarf, Or sunset’s yellow play To eyelids in the sepulchre. How still the dancer lies, While color’s revelations break, And blaze the butterflies!

XVIII. The Spirit.

’T is whiter than an Indian pipe, ’T is dimmer than a lace; No stature has it, like a fog, When you approach the place. Not any voice denotes it here, Or intimates it there; A spirit, how doth it accost? What customs hath the air? This limitless hyperbole Each one of us shall be; ’T is drama, if (hypothesis) It be not tragedy!

XIX. The Monument.

She laid her docile crescent down, And this mechanic stone Still states, to dates that have forgot, The news that she is gone. So constant to its stolid trust, The shaft that never knew, It shames the constancy that fled Before its emblem flew. HDT WHAT? INDEX

EMILY DICKINSON EMILY DICKINSON XX.

Bless God, he went as soldiers, His musket on his breast; Grant, God, he charge the bravest Of all the martial blest. Please God, might I behold him In epauletted white, I should not fear the foe then, I should not fear the fight.

XXI.

Immortal is an ample word When what we need is by, But when it leaves us for a time, ’T is a necessity. Of heaven above the firmest proof We fundamental know, Except for its marauding hand, It had been heaven below.

XXII.

Where every bird is bold to go, And bees abashless play, The foreigner before he knocks Must thrust the tears away.

XXIII.

The grave my little cottage is, Where, keeping house for thee, I make my parlor orderly, And lay the marble tea, For two divided, briefly, A cycle, it may be, Till everlasting life unite In strong society.

XXIV.

This was in the white of the year, That was in the green, Drifts were as difficult then to think As daisies now to be seen. Looking back is best that is left, Or if it be before, Retrospection is prospect’s half, Sometimes almost more.

XXV.

Sweet hours have perished here; This is a mighty room; Within its precincts hopes have played,— Now shadows in the tomb. HDT WHAT? INDEX

EMILY DICKINSON EMILY DICKINSON XXVI.

Me! Come! My dazzled face In such a shining place! Me! Hear! My foreign ear The sounds of welcome near! The saints shall meet Our bashful feet. My holiday shall be That they remember me; My paradise, the fame That they pronounce my name.

XXVII. Invisible.

From us she wandered now a year, Her tarrying unknown; If wilderness prevent her feet, Or that ethereal zone No eye hath seen and lived, We ignorant must be. We only know what time of year We took the mystery.

XXVIII.

I wish I knew that woman’s name, So, when she comes this way, To hold my life, and hold my ears, For fear I hear her say She ’s ‘sorry I am dead,’ again, Just when the grave and I Have sobbed ourselves almost to sleep,— Our only lullaby.

XXIX. Trying to Forget.

Bereaved of all, I went abroad, No less bereaved to be Upon a new peninsula,— The grave preceded me, Obtained my lodgings ere myself, And when I sought my bed, The grave it was, reposed upon The pillow for my head. I waked, to find it first awake, I rose,—it followed me; I tried to drop it in the crowd, To lose it in the sea, In cups of artificial drowse To sleep its shape away,— The grave was finished, but the spade Remained in memory. HDT WHAT? INDEX

EMILY DICKINSON EMILY DICKINSON XXX.

I felt a funeral in my brain, And mourners, to and fro, Kept treading, treading, till it seemed That sense was breaking through. And when they all were seated, A service like a drum Kept beating, beating, till I thought My mind was going numb. And then I heard them lift a box, And creak across my soul With those same boots of lead, again. Then space began to toll As all the heavens were a bell, And Being but an ear, And I and silence some strange race, Wrecked, solitary, here.

XXXI.

I meant to find her when I came; Death had the same design; But the success was his, it seems, And the discomfit mine. I meant to tell her how I longed For just this single time; But Death had told her so the first, And she had hearkened him. To wander now is my abode; To rest,—to rest would be A privilege of hurricane To memory and me.

XXXII. Waiting.

I sing to use the waiting, My bonnet but to tie, And shut the door unto my house; No more to do have I, Till, his best step approaching, We journey to the day, And tell each other how we sang To keep the dark away.

XXXIII.

A sickness of this world it most occasions When best men die; A wishfulness their fat condition To occupy. A chief indifference, as foreign A world must be Themselves forsake contented, For Deity. HDT WHAT? INDEX

EMILY DICKINSON EMILY DICKINSON XXXIV.

Superfluous were the sun When excellence is dead; He were superfluous every day, For every day is said That syllable whose faith Just saves it from despair, And whose ‘I ’ll meet you’ hesitates If love inquire, ‘Where?’ Upon his dateless fame Our periods may lie, As stars that drop anonymous From an abundant sky.

XXXV.

So proud she was to die It made us all ashamed That what we cherished, so unknown To her desire seemed. So satisfied to go Where none of us should be, Immediately, that anguish stooped Almost to jealousy.

XXXVI. Farewell.

Tie the strings to my life, my Lord, Then I am ready to go! Just a look at the horses— Rapid! That will do! Put me in on the firmest side, So I shall never fall; For we must ride to the Judgment, And it ’s partly down hill. But never I mind the bridges, And never I mind the sea; Held fast in everlasting race By my own choice and thee. Good-by to the life I used to live, And the world I used to know; And kiss the hills for me, just once; Now I am ready to go!

XXXVII.

The dying need but little, dear,— A glass of water ’s all, A flower’s unobtrusive face To punctuate the wall, A fan, perhaps, a friend’s regret, And certainly that one No color in the rainbow Perceives when you are gone. HDT WHAT? INDEX

EMILY DICKINSON EMILY DICKINSON XXXVIII. Dead.

There ’s something quieter than sleep Within this inner room! It wears a sprig upon its breast, And will not tell its name. Some touch it and some kiss it, Some chafe its idle hand; It has a simple gravity I do not understand! While simple-hearted neighbors Chat of the ‘early dead,’ We, prone to periphrasis, Remark that birds have fled!

XXXIX.

The soul should always stand ajar, That if the heaven inquire, He will not be obliged to wait, Or shy of troubling her. Depart, before the host has slid The bolt upon the door, To seek for the accomplished guest,— Her visitor no more.

XL.

Three weeks passed since I had seen her,— Some disease had vexed; ’T was with text and village singing I beheld her next, And a company—our pleasure To discourse alone; Gracious now to me as any, Gracious unto none. Borne, without dissent of either, To the parish night; Of the separated people Which are out of sight?

XLI.

I breathed enough to learn the trick, And now, removed from air, I simulate the breath so well, That one, to be quite sure The lungs are stirless, must descend Among the cunning cells, And touch the pantomime himself. How cool the bellows feels!

XLII.

I wonder if the sepulchre Is not a lonesome way, When men and boys, and larks and June Go down the fields to hay! HDT WHAT? INDEX

EMILY DICKINSON EMILY DICKINSON XLIII. Joy in Death.

If tolling bell I ask the cause. ’A soul has gone to God,’ I ’m answered in a lonesome tone; Is heaven then so sad? That bells should joyful ring to tell A soul had gone to heaven, Would seem to me the proper way A good news should be given.

XLIV.

If I may have it when it ’s dead I will contented be; If just as soon as breath is out It shall belong to me, Until they lock it in the grave, ’T is bliss I cannot weigh, For though they lock thee in the grave, Myself can hold the key. Think of it, lover! I and thee Permitted face to face to be; After a life, a death we ’ll say,— For death was that, and this is thee.

XLV.

Before the ice is in the pools, Before the skaters go, Or any cheek at nightfall Is tarnished by the snow, Before the fields have finished, Before the Christmas tree, Wonder upon wonder Will arrive to me! What we touch the hems of On a summer’s day; What is only walking Just a bridge away; That which sings so, speaks so, When there ’s no one here,— Will the frock I wept in Answer me to wear?

XLVI. Dying.

I heard a fly buzz when I died; The stillness round my form Was like the stillness in the air Between the heaves of storm. The eyes beside had wrung them dry, And breaths were gathering sure For that last onset, when the king Be witnessed in his power. I willed my keepsakes, signed away What portion of me I Could make assignable,—and then There interposed a fly, With blue, uncertain, stumbling buzz, Between the light and me; And then the windows failed, and then I could not see to see. HDT WHAT? INDEX

EMILY DICKINSON EMILY DICKINSON XLVII.

Adrift! A little boat adrift! And night is coming down! Will no one guide a little boat Unto the nearest town? So sailors say, on yesterday, Just as the dusk was brown, One little boat gave up its strife, And gurgled down and down. But angels say, on yesterday, Just as the dawn was red, One little boat o’erspent with gales Retrimmed its masts, redecked its sails Exultant, onward sped!

XLVIII.

There’s been a death in the opposite house As lately as to-day. I know it by the numb look Such houses have alway. The neighbors rustle in and out, The doctor drives away. A window opens like a pod, Abrupt, mechanically; Somebody flings a mattress out,— The children hurry by; They wonder if It died on that,— I used to when a boy. The minister goes stiffly in As if the house were his, And he owned all the mourners now, And little boys besides; And then the milliner, and the man Of the appalling trade, To take the measure of the house. There ’ll be that dark parade Of tassels and of coaches soon; It ’s easy as a sign,— The intuition of the news In just a country town.

XLIX.

We never know we go,—when we are going We jest and shut the door; Fate following behind us bolts it, And we accost no more. L. The Soul’s Storm. It struck me every day The lightning was as new As if the cloud that instant slit And let the fire through. It burned me in the night, It blistered in my dream; It sickened fresh upon my sight With every morning’s beam. I thought that storm was brief,— The maddest, quickest by; But Nature lost the date of this, And left it in the sky. HDT WHAT? INDEX

EMILY DICKINSON EMILY DICKINSON LI.

Water is taught by thirst; Land, by the oceans passed; Transport, by throe; Peace, by its battles told; Love, by memorial mould; Birds, by the snow.

LII. Thirst.

We thirst at fast,—’t is Nature’s act; And later, when we die, A little water supplicate Of fingers going by. It intimates the finer want, Whose adequate supply Is that great water in the west Termed immortality.

LIII.

A clock stopped—not the mantel’s; Geneva’s farthest skill Can’t put the puppet bowing That just now dangled still. An awe came on the trinket! The figures hunched with pain, Then quivered out of decimals Into degreeless noon. It will not stir for doctors, This pendulum of snow; The shopman importunes it, While cool, concernless No Nods from the gilded pointers, Nods from the seconds slim, Decades of arrogance between The dial life and him.

LIV. Charlotte Brontë’s Grave.

All overgrown by cunning moss, All interspersed with weed, The little cage of ‘Currer Bell,’ In quiet Haworth laid. This bird, observing others, When frosts too sharp became, Retire to other latitudes, Quietly did the same, But differed in returning; Since Yorkshire hills are green, Yet not in all the nests I meet Can nightingale be seen. Gathered from many wanderings, Gethsemane can tell Through what transporting anguish She reached the asphodel! Soft fall the sounds of Eden Upon her puzzled ear; Oh, what an afternoon for heaven, When ‘Brontë’ entered there! HDT WHAT? INDEX

EMILY DICKINSON EMILY DICKINSON LV.

A toad can die of light! Death is the common right Of toads and men,— Of earl and midge The privilege. Why swagger then? The gnat’s supremacy Is large as thine.

LVI.

Far from love the Heavenly Father Leads the chosen child; Oftener through realm of briar Than the meadow mild, Oftener by the claw of dragon Than the hand of friend, Guides the little one predestined To the native land.

LVII. Sleeping.

A long, long sleep, a famous sleep That makes no show for dawn By stretch of limb or stir of lid,— An independent one. Was ever idleness like this? Within a hut of stone To bask the centuries away Nor once look up for noon?

LVIII. Retrospect.

’T was just this time last year I died. I know I heard the corn, When I was carried by the farms,— It had the tassels on. I thought how yellow it would look When Richard went to mill; And then I wanted to get out, But something held my will. I thought just how red apples wedged The stubble’s joints between; And carts went stooping round the fields To take the pumpkins in. I wondered which would miss me least, And when Thanksgiving came, If father ’d multiply the plates To make an even sum. And if my stocking hung too high, Would it blur the Christmas glee, That not a Santa Claus could reach The altitude of me? But this sort grieved myself, and so I thought how it would be When just this time, some perfect year, Themselves should come to me. HDT WHAT? INDEX

EMILY DICKINSON EMILY DICKINSON LIX. Eternity.

On this wondrous sea, Sailing silently, Ho! pilot, ho! Knowest thou the shore Where no breakers roar, Where the storm is o’er? In the silent west Many sails at rest, Their anchors fast; Thither I pilot thee,— Land, ho! Eternity! Ashore at last!