These Fevered Days

Ebenezer Snell woke early. Looking east to the Pelham Hills, he saw dawn saturate the Connecticut River Valley. He dressed, careful not to disturb his wife and five daughters, and walked outside to check his scientific apparatus. Snell was forty-four years old, the first graduate of Amherst College, and now a professor of mathematics and natural philosophy at his beloved college on the hill. Not a large or robust man—he had such a modest manner, some of his first students called him “Miss Snell.”* They loved him for his kindness, and delighted—like everyone else in town—in his obsession with weather. For the last ten years, Professor Snell had risen every morning to record measurements and scientific observations in a large leather-bound journal. Now he opened the book, skimming past the title page: The Meteorological Journal Kept at Amherst College. Long. W 72 degrees 34' 30." Lat. N 42 degrees 22' 21." Station 267 feet above the Ocean Commencing 1835. Turning to the new day, he wrote, “Sabbath, August 3, 1845.” Every year Snell added new columns and categories to his tabulations—wet bulb measurements, dry bulb measurements, mean temperature. “Pure Air” was a frequent exclamation. For today, though, he concentrated on his six original calculations—barometer, attached temperature, external temperature, clouds, winds and fall of water. “Sunrise,” he wrote, and then recorded: barometer 30.000; attached thermometer 69 degrees; external thermometer 57 degrees; cloudiness 8 SW cir; winds SW ½; fall of water 0.† In the margin, he jotted down additional remarks: “vegetation suffers from long drought,” “plants withering,” “smoky in morning.” Later that day, Professor Snell would return to his journal and record three additional sets of numbers for 8 a.m., 3 p.m., and 6 p.m. He also included one more observation. When he was outdoors at noon and looked up, Snell saw a parhelion, a bright circle ringing the sun.¹ He picked up his pen and added the note.

Less than a mile down the road, fourteen-year-old Emily Dickinson knew what she wanted to do that summer day. Emily loved Sundays. She enjoyed the visits of friends and family who stopped in the afternoon for lemonade or the family’s homemade currant wine. In the evening, she joined other Amherst residents in Mr. Woodman’s Singing School—everything about music enthralled her. She especially loved long Sunday conversations with her older brother, Austin, when he was home from boarding school. The two sat by the stove and said whatever entered their minds. That is, until their father opened the kitchen door and the siblings swallowed their words with barely concealed smiles. What Emily did not like about Sundays was going to church. The service was long and the hymns were accompanied by a bass viol, and—according to one parishioner—appalling. Emily was lucky. Her parents did not demand that she attend services, and she occasionally slipped out before communion and walked home. Other times she would endure morning worship in order to earn the “privilege”—as she put it—of avoiding another service later in the day.² More often than not, though, she simply chose not to attend at all, and her parents did not protest. It was not going to church that Emily loved best about Sundays; with the house empty, she felt unleashed. Not that she did not love her family: living under the same roof with her mother and father, brother Austin, and younger sister Vinnie always felt right to her even as she grew older. But being alone set loose in her a potent force. With no one around, she would proclaim, “I am left alone in all my glory.”³ Today Emily wanted to stay home and write a letter to her friend Abiah Root. Recently Emily’s consciousness had shifted. Sitting down at her desk felt more solemn, more purposeful, and she wanted to make an announcement. Her words would be nothing so bold as a manifesto or even a declaration; they would be quieter, but no less convincing. Emily wanted to tell her friend that she could see her future and was ready for the days before her. She was putting Abiah on notice—perhaps the world, as well—that she was serious about writing. Nothing gave her a greater sense of pride or made her feel more alive. Years later, those who marveled at her dazzling words wondered what she could hear that others could not? She answered once. “All have gone to church – the wagons have done passing, and I have come out in the new grass to listen to the anthems.”⁴

But before she wrote Abiah, Emily had to settle in: her mind switching as it frequently did from her family to her friends, from school to home, and even Sunday meeting. As much as she tried to avoid church, Emily had to admit that sermons at the First Church of Amherst had been better since Rev. Aaron Colton had become the minister. Congregationalists in town were hard on their clergy: opinionated, demanding, and tight with money. When one of Colton’s predecessors was sent packing, the deposed minister’s wife spared few words about the good people of Amherst. “New Zelanders would have behaved better,” she snarled.‡⁵ Emily liked that Reverend Colton did not fall into the habit of spouting religious platitudes. If she had to sit in church, she preferred it would be Reverend Colton’s—at least his language had color and vitality. Emily always paid attention to words, more so than to the spiritual injunctions. When someone’s language was stale and predictable, she lost interest and her mind wandered. But when words made ideas come alive, she was transported. Her father could be caught up in language too—even the language of sermons—although most people would have been surprised that Edward Dickinson could be carried away by anything other than a legal brief. After hearing one sermon at Boston’s Park Street Church, Edward had written home, “If I could hear such preaching, every Sabbath, I would walk ten miles, in mud, knee deep . . . I do really wish Providence would so order it, that we could, now & then, have something worth the trouble of hearing. I could never sleep under such preaching—& never tire.”⁶ There were no reports of Edward sleeping in church that drowsy August morning, although it was growing warmer by the hour. Hot weather bothered Emily and she knew First Church would be stifling with too many people sitting too closely together. In Friday’s newspaper, Professor Snell had reported that Amherst had shattered several records for heat. If Emily needed any additional excuse for missing church that morning, she had one in Reverend Colton’s absence. Colton was away from the pulpit and, in his place, two Amherst College professors assumed the preaching duties: Professor Fowler in the morning and Professor Warner in the afternoon. Spiritual guidance by way of professors of rhetoric on a steamy summer day, squeezed into rigid pews next to townsfolk mopping their faces did not sound inviting to Emily—certainly not as appealing as being alone at her desk.

Emily said the summer of her fourteenth year had been the best in her life and she wanted to share everything in the letter to her friend Abiah.⁷ The two girls had attended Amherst Academy together the year before, along with Emily Fowler and Mary Warner, the rhetoric professors’ daughters.§ Now that Abiah had moved and was living hours away, Emily was eager to pour her thoughts onto the page. She had much to tell. There was a new piano in the house—the family’s first—and she was learning lively marches and popular songs. The academy’s summer term was nearly over and public examinations were around the corner. The dreaded examination, she thought. All Emily could think of were “those tall, stern, trustees” staring when teachers called upon her to recite an aspect of biblical law. “I am already gasping,” she wrote.⁸ But her preoccupations in the letter were not solely about school. She told Abiah about cutting bookmarks, new births in town, gardening, and drying forget-me-nots. All the girls were making herbariums. “I have got an idea that you are knitting edging,” she said.⁹ Emily also loved sharing gossip, especially accounts of romantic couplings. Who, she wanted to know, was this Mr. Eastcott, the one who gave Abiah concert tickets. “I think for my part it looks rather suspicious.”¹⁰ She noted Abby was taking interest in William. Don’t you think he will make a devoted husband, she wrote. Sabra was going back to Baltimore in a few weeks after honoring us poor country folks with her presence, she added, and poor Hatty doesn’t seem to have time for anything now that she was teaching school. “I have some patience with these – School Marms,” Emily all but sighed. “They have so many trials.”¹¹

As she wrote, Emily examined the pen stand on her desk. She knew the letter was going to be a long one, and could take a while to compose. So many words and ideas crowded her mind—they seemed to rush ahead of her hand. “I can hardly have patience to write,” she once told Abiah. “I have worlds of things to tell you, and my pen is not swift enough to answer my purpose at all.”¹² Lately Emily had made a ritual of writing a letter: clearing space and time, and even her small desk in order to gather her thoughts. She studied the surface before her as if moving the inkwell would help her concentrate or anticipate the words ahead. She now took a slow, deliberate, formal, even ceremonial approach that prepared her for writing, and she expected Abiah to be ready as well: she imagined her friend leaving behind every chore and sitting down with her letter. Placing words on the page and envisioning Abiah savoring her sentences carried weight for her. Emily said a voice inside her head commanded her to write. She called it her “faithful monitor” and she could not keep it quiet for long.¹³ Nor did she want to. If anyone that Sunday suggested that there was an element of the sacred to her ritual, she likely would have disagreed. There was no open Bible. No sanctified cloth. No preacher or even professors substituting for a divinely inspired voice. Not even a candlestick before her. This ceremony was liturgy of a different order. If her desk were indeed an altar, it was a shrine not to God, but to words.

That summer the Dickinson family was enjoying hard-won stability. Gone were the days when Edward and Emily Norcross Dickinson and their three children had to share half a house with Edward’s parents. As cramped as the living arrangement was, it was worse when Samuel and Lucretia Dickinson were forced to move to Ohio for financial reasons. Dickinson’s grandfather had been a pillar in the community: a lawyer, politician, and one of Amherst College’s first trustees. A diligent man with lofty dreams and good intentions, he often rose before dawn and walked seven miles to court in Northampton because he was too impatient to wait for the daily coach.¹⁴ Samuel’s impulsiveness extended to financial matters as well. He had been reckless with his own money—and other people’s too—and gave far more to get Amherst College up and running than his personal finances could afford. When he withdrew to Ohio for a job as head of manual labor at Lane Theological Seminary, his spirits were broken and few thought he could recover. He did not regain his health, and died of lung fever in 1838 at age sixty-two. “Ever since I can remember,” Edward’s sister observed, our father’s “life has been one of anxiety & care & disappointment.”¹⁵

Samuel’s death affected the young Dickinson family in a number of ways. For Edward, it meant a lifetime of working to reclaim the family’s prominence and reestablish his father’s good name. For Emily and the rest of the Dickinsons, it meant living with the specter of Samuel’s failure and sharing the house again—this time with a family unrelated to them. Gen. David Mack and his wife, Mary, took up residence in the western half of the old Homestead while the Dickinsons moved all their furnishings to the east. General Mack, the owner of the hat factory in town, was an imposing figure to Emily and her siblings. As a boy, Austin remembered the first time he saw the general. “I thought I had seen God,” he said. “tall, erect, of powerful build . . . a believer in law and penalty.” Austin called him “a Puritan of the Puritans.”¹⁶ Living alongside General Mack and his family in tight quarters lasted six years. Then the Dickinsons knew it was time to strike out on their own. By 1840, Edward had earned enough money in his law practice to buy a house on West Street around the corner from the Homestead. The two-story frame home had a grape arbor, lattices, and—with two acres—enough ground for flowers, a vegetable garden, a horse, and chickens.

The chickens were Austin’s pride. He once boasted in a letter to the local newspaper asking if anyone’s hens laid larger eggs than his. The flock had a habit of wandering off the property and good-natured neighbors frequently could be seen carrying the Dickinsons’ feisty prize rooster back to the coop. When sixteen-year-old Austin was twenty-five miles away studying at Williston Academy, Emily kept him up to date with chatty letters of neighbors’ foibles and barnyard drama. “The other day,” she began, “Francis brought your Rooster home and the other 2 went to fighting him while I was gone to School – mother happened to look out of the window and she saw him laying on the ground – he was most dead – but she and Aunt Elisabeth went right out and took him up and put him in a Coop and he is nearly well now – while he is shut up the other Roosters – will come around and insult him in Every possible way by Crowing right in his Ears – and then they will jump up on the Coop and Crow there as if they – wanted to show that he was Completely in their power and they could treat him as they chose – Aunt Elisabeth said she wished their throats would split.”¶ ¹⁷ Letters to Austin were not the same, of course, as having him sit with her by the stove, but they did provide a way for Emily to stay close to her brother. “There was always such a Hurrah wherever you was,” she wrote.¹⁸

The new house suited Emily’s mother. Home meant everything to Emily Norcross Dickinson, and she delighted in finally having a place of her own to raise a family. The house was still near enough the town center that she could stroll to First Church to help with the summer Ladies’ Fair or drop into Cutler’s General Store for oranges, imported French chocolate, or all those coconuts the family loved. Proximity also made it easy to be involved with town events. When the local Temperance Society met at the Amherst Hotel, for example, Mrs. Dickinson joined the crowd in congratulating the proprietors on banishing rum. Yet no one around Amherst would ever call Mrs. Dickinson genial or a natural when it came to socializing. She had a reserved quality that kept others at a distance and her innermost thoughts to herself. Since Amherst was a lively and learned town, it was difficult for her to duck away from conversation after lectures at the college or during political events when officials frequently tapped her husband for a public role. One professor’s wife, Deborah Fiske, put her finger on two qualities that made Amherst unique. Amherst, Massachusetts, she said, was filled with “a very spending evening sort of folks” and its best women were “free from the silly birdish airs.”¹⁹ Emily Norcross Dickinson, while a serious woman, did not easily fit the expectation when it came to spending evenings. Some residents mistook her diffidence for gloom and went so far as to call her doleful. One acquaintance complained that a call on Mrs. Dickinson was full of her usual “plaintive talk.”²⁰ There were other criticisms, too, even from family. Everyone grumbled that she did not write enough letters. Her mother-in-law became so exasperated she once declared sarcastically to Edward, “Tell Emily, I wish she would write her name in your next letter so as not [to] forget to write. I would write her sometimes, if she would answer my letters.”²¹ Harsh as such appraisals were, the rebuke did not cause Mrs. Dickinson to change her ways. Even though Sunday was a day when many people caught up on letter writing, she did what she enjoyed most: baked cakes, tended to her exotic figs, darned socks that Austin had sent home for mending, and—according to her elder daughter—surveyed her domain. Writing to her brother, Emily once joked, “Mother taking a tour of the second story as she is wont Sabbath evening.”²²

Although some Amherst residents would quibble that a house abutting the town cemetery—charming residence though it was—was not an ideal location, the Dickinsons felt they had space and privacy at last. But hours alone were not easy to come by for young Emily. The Dickinsons always seemed to have people around. In the early years of their marriage, Emily’s parents had taken in boarders to earn additional money and provide protection—as Edward argued—for his wife when he was in Boston on business. Edward’s forthright sister-in-law, Lavinia Norcross, did not see the situation that way. All those boarders made for more women’s work, she said, and her sister did not need to be kept so incessantly busy with cooking, cleaning, and maintaining a household. With more money in the bank now, the boarders were long gone, but the house still was full. Either Aunt Elizabeth was staying for a few weeks—demanding that young Emily look under the bed for who-knows-what every time she went to sleep—or family friends sent their children to live with the Dickinsons while the youngsters attended the academy. Vinnie or Emily had to double up on those occasions and share their beds when guests were with them for extended stays. As long as Emily was allowed a retreat from time to time, she did not mind the company.#

Strain for Emily, however, came from the demands associated with her father’s many obligations. Now that he served as Amherst College treasurer, students trooped in and out of the house with tuition payments, professors stopped by with advice on how he might eke out more money from the State House, and trustees sat in the parlor urging Edward to use his growing political clout to the college’s advantage. Edward’s responsibilities were not limited to his law practice and college duties either. He was president of the Henry Clay Club, the local lyceum, and the Franklin and Hampden Agricultural Society. As an elected official, he served in the state senate, and became a representative to the General Court and Governor’s Council. Edward liked the tumble of politics and was good at it, but being away from Amherst and his family for long stretches grew wearisome. He vowed to stay put and never run for political office again, but then he waffled and won another election that took him back to Boston for months at a time. Nothing curbed his continued civic involvement, not even a furious constituent writing in the local newspaper. “Was there ever standing on two legs,” the critic wrote, “such a lump of hypocrisy, deceit, trickery, craftiness, corruption, fraud and cheating, as is filled up in this six foot [sprig] of whigism?”²³ A few years earlier, when enterprising young New Englanders looked west and began purchasing land, Edward had uncharacteristically jumped in. He’d bought acreage in Michigan on the Lake Huron side. For a moment, it looked like the allure of someplace else might take the Dickinsons away from their deep roots in Massachusetts. But recently he’d made up his mind and this time he did not waver; he sold off the Michigan property. Father’s life is a boisterous one, Emily observed, and—like her mother—she accepted family duties and the commotion at home.²⁴ Sometimes, though, she wished she could be as lighthearted as her sister, Lavinia. Vinnie genuinely enjoyed company and could carry on conversations and laugh with ease. Emily would make appearances when she had to, but wearing a public face at her father’s events drained her of energy she preferred to expend elsewhere.

To say Emily and her eleven-year-old younger sister shared little in common would be a mistake. Although Vinnie usually dove into female chores with an enthusiasm Emily could not understand—“I dont see much of Vinnie,” she once remarked, “she’s mostly dusting stairs!”—the sisters shared much, including a similar sense of humor.²⁵ Young as they were, they both had a cultivated sense of the absurd, and loved scanning the newspaper—Vinnie sewing and Emily reading aloud—searching for articles they found comical. Their favorites were stories of improbable calamities and shocking deaths, articles that Emily described as “funny accidents, where railroads meet each other unexpectedly, and gentlemen in factories get their heads cut off quite informally.”²⁶ What made the stories so funny, she said, was that reporters told them in a sprightly way. Take the article two days ago in Friday’s newspaper: “A fine cow, belonging to Mr. William Feeter of Manheim, died a few days since from some intestinal ailing, having taken her food and drink with difficulty for several months past. Resolved, if possible to ascertain the nature of the disease, Mr. Fetter had a post mortem examination of the animal where a live milk snake nearly three feet long was found in her stomach.”²⁷ The italics alone would have amused Vinnie, never mind the snake. Like all Dickinsons, Vinnie also was protective, fierce, and loyal to a fault. Although she may not have known why Emily needed privacy and so much time alone, she gave her sister both. Not being overly concerned about reasons and consequences may have been exactly the attributes Emily found indispensable in her sister. After they had grown, Emily looked back on their girlhood and called her attachment to Vinnie “early, earnest, indissoluble.”²⁸

“Give my love to Biah,” Vinnie said when she knew Emily was writing a letter to their friend.²⁹ Emily was happy to relay the good wishes, since she knew her sister—like their mother—did not correspond much. In delivering the greetings, she tried to capture Vinnie’s voice, even noting the way her sister dropped the initial “A” of Abiah’s name. Emily’s ear was keen and she understood that accurately replicating sound was part of good writing. Episcopalians always say Aamen, she heard people remark. Abiah calls the piano a “piny,” and “Is n’t [Ellena] a beautiful name?” she once gushed.³⁰ While both Emily and Vinnie missed Abiah, they were hardly lacking in friends at the academy. There was Emily Fowler and Mary Warner, their cousin Sophia Holland, who lived around the corner, Mary Louisa Snell, and Jane Hitchcock, Vinnie’s best friend.** In particular, Emily held dear the group she called her Circle of Five: smart and lively girls who dove into their studies of mental philosophy, geology, Latin, and botany. “How large they sound, don’t they?” Emily boasted.³¹ Jane, Sophia, and Emily also took French lessons from Charles Temple, an Amherst College senior, who regularly walked over to the academy to instruct a select group. Occasionally Emily was able to work in German classes too. In addition, the girls were fortunate to hear lectures offered at the college. Amherst College president Edward Hitchcock, Jane’s father, took an interest in welcoming academy boys and girls to college talks. He loved dissecting a mannequin for science lectures, holding up each anatomical part and explaining the wonders of its function. “I don’t think a practicing doctor could have done it as well,” one student remembered.³² Hitchcock, a man with a capacious mind and generous spirit, was an expert in many fields, especially the geologic history of the region. He expounded on dinosaurs and glaciers, and his lectures on volcanoes struck Emily with a force she would long remember. For girls, whose intellect was often ignored by the world around them, the education offered at the academy was substantial. Not every Amherst parent saw it that way, of course. Mary Jones said she wished her daughter would concentrate more on dancing lessons, flower drawing, and attainments that would give her a “polish of manner.” Amherst is such a peculiar town, she complained, a “land of factories equality and independence.” ³³ When British scholar Harriet Martineau came through Amherst on her American tour of female education, she noted forty to fifty academy girls listening attentively to President Hitchcock’s lectures. “No evil had been found to result from it,” she reported.³⁴

Charles Temple had other talents besides teaching French at the Academy. The young man from faraway Smyrna was accomplished at cutting silhouettes and had asked Emily if she would like one.†† She said yes. While Charles snipped the contours of her face, she sat patiently, stealing a glance from time to time as slivers of black paper cascaded to the floor. In only a few minutes, he was finished and handed Emily the silhouette. She studied the image in her hands and saw a girl with a slight frame, bobbed hair, small nose, and chin tucked in. Alert, some might say, or cautious. Emily knew a silhouette was merely an outline—more suggestion than assertion—but the likeness stared back at her with the insistence of a clue. It was odd that she did not mention the silhouette to Abiah. Lately Emily had been interested in her own looks and the ways her friends were maturing. Over the last few months when former classmates who had been away stopped by to visit, she had looked at them for signs of change and did not see any. But when she looked at herself in the mirror, something was different. Emily joked with Abiah. “I am growing handsome very fast indeed,” she crowed, and “expect I shall be the belle of Amherst when I reach my 17th year.”³⁵ Abiah may have laughed when calculating that fourteen-year-old Emily had given herself a few more years before turning heads. But Emily had altered—that was certain—growing taller, wearing long dresses, and sometimes covering her hair in a net cap. Her hair, she said, studying the color closely, was golden.³⁶

“I have had no leisure for anything,” Emily wrote her friend.³⁷ The new piano took a lot of her attention, but she did not mind. Emily had been waiting for a piano for many months. From the time she was toddler, she was taken with music, tapping out notes on her aunt Lavinia’s piano and calling them “moosic”—the first spoken word anyone could remember her saying.³⁸ A year ago, Edward had asked his brother in Worcester to search the city for a good piano at a fair price that both Emily and Vinnie could use. “I prefer Rosewood,” he instructed. “3 pedals—& a stool.”³⁹ Within a year, a piano matching Edward’s directives arrived in Amherst: a square Renaissance revival pianoforte with carved legs made of rich Brazilian rosewood. Emily jumped into lessons and made good progress, becoming competent in waltzes and syncopation. She was willing to devote hours to practice, while Vinnie was not. Emily’s sister became distracted easily and was unable to sit for long periods of time mastering fingerings and scales. Emily was eager to move ahead, leaping over the initial drills to try her hand at new creations until her teacher reined her in. “She shant let me have many tunes now,” Emily had explained, “for she wants I should get over in the book a good ways first.”⁴⁰ As dedicated as she was to her lessons, Emily understood there was more to music than notes on a page. Music taught her what rhythm, style, and going against the rules could accomplish. A variation in phrasing, tempo, or touch could create a difference that hours of tedious drills never could convey. Her practice book’s description underscored the point: “Style is something that cannot be transferred, and for which no rules are given . . . Style is the spirit of the performance.”⁴¹ Emily stayed up late at night creating her own compositions and playing what others called odd tunes with weird and beautiful melodies. Once, half apologizing for keeping a guest up at night, Emily had admitted that she knew her music might bother others. The notes, she said, “madden me, with their grief and fun.”⁴²

Schoolwork kept Emily occupied, too, especially her assignments for Wednesday afternoons. Each Wednesday, Amherst Academy teachers selected a handful of students to read their essays in front of the others. “Autobiography of a Goosequill” was one theme. “Genius seldom satisfied with its own production” was another.⁴³ “I have written one composition this term, and I need not assure you it was exceedingly edifying to myself as well as everybody else,” Emily bragged to Abiah. “Don’t you want to see it? I really wish you could have a chance.”⁴⁴ The school assembly always filled Emily with a tangle of emotions: pride when she was selected and dread when teachers asked her to stand and read to others. Although she was confident in her written work, she did not like to perform. Reading in public made her chest tighten and at times she sensed the envy of other students. Emily knew she was among the best writers at the academy and could be far from charitable when listening to what others wrote. One young man came under her withering scrutiny with his theme “Think twice before you speak.” He began with an ill-conceived example: if a young gentleman boarded in a tavern and offered a young lady his arm and had a dog with no tail—think twice before you speak. When the second example was more disastrous than the first, Emily had enough. Afterward, she walked up to the young man with a response she could not contain. Think twice before you speak, she had told him.⁴⁵

Emily knew Abiah would appreciate news of Composition Day. The day was special to them because the two girls had met the previous spring on a Wednesday afternoon. Emily could recall the moment clearly and enjoyed recounting the story even as she grew older. Their first meeting unfolded in her mind like a scene in a play. She was shy, she remembered, and sought the corners of a room. Vinnie, Emily Fowler, Jane, and other students climbed stairs to the third floor as teachers searched for readers. Tall windows flooded the room with light: to the west, the Connecticut River; to the east, the Pelham Hills; to the south, the Holyoke Range; and to the north, Mount Toby’s oval plateau. The encircling mountains always pleased Emily, and offered a sense of reassurance and proportion. Perhaps they calmed her jitters too. She looked around the recitation room at the boys and girls: everyone appeared so expectant, high-minded, and serious. Such an august assembly, she had said to herself, with a tinge of amusement.⁴⁶ That’s when she noticed a girl she did not recognize. The new girl in town, someone said, staying for the school term with cousins.

Maybe it was Abiah’s confidence coming up the stairs that first caught Emily’s attention or her composure entering that venerable room or perhaps her singular absence of nerves that Emily found difficult to imagine. One thing was certain: Emily could not take her eyes off Abiah’s hair. Before coming to school, Abiah had stopped to pick dandelions and then wove them into her dark curls. Emily liked her instantly. Abiah appeared independent and unbridled by convention. But there was something else: something about the dandelions themselves. Emily understood, of course, what a literary image was. She had studied poems in school and read verses that appeared in the newspaper, often clipping them out to save and study later. She understood how a single object could represent something else and trigger emotions, even profound ones. The sight of Abiah’s dandelions, however, prompted more than a schoolgirl lesson on imagery. Emily was coming to understand how to make ideas visible. The dandelions utterly transformed the staid Composition Day for her, as if shaking all the stiffness out of the room and flinging it to the fields. In Emily’s mind, they were more vivid than the actual children around her. The dandelions made her forget the clambering students and the nonsensical essays and the pulse of anxiety in her throat—and focus instead on the sheer astonishment of yellow weeds. One image could change everything, she thought.⁴⁷

One academy teacher kept a mental note of how exceptional Emily was. Emily Dickinson, he wrote, was an excellent scholar of exemplary deportment, faithful in all school duties. Her compositions were extraordinary, strikingly original in thought and style and far above what a child her age might have produced.⁴⁸ He did not comment, however, on her industry or on the ways Emily and her friends sought out additional literary endeavors to satisfy their creativity. Papers flew back and forth among the girls for comment, and occasionally a former female teacher would share one with them as well.‡‡ Abiah was writing fiction, too, a romance. “Please send me a copy,” Emily implored, “I am in a fever to read it.”⁴⁹ In their most ambitious project, a group of academy girls—Emily included—had produced a handwritten literary journal of original compositions, Forest Leaves, which they circulated among classmates. According to Emily Fowler, Emily Dickinson was known as one of the best writers in the academy and also one of its sharpest wits. Penning the humor column was her responsibility. Their friend Fanny Montague drew the words of the journal’s title page, crafting each letter in the shape of a leaf. When the girls distributed Forest Leaves, the other students quickly recognized articles by their classmates’ handwriting. Emily’s script was unmistakable: small, clear, and finished. As much as they were proud of their journal, no one, unfortunately, bothered to keep a copy. The girls gave them all away. We were reckless, Emily Fowler later lamented, adding with disparagement, “Helen Fiske did no special work on the paper for various reasons.”^§§ ⁵⁰

Helen Fiske had been Emily’s friend when they were children. Her father taught Latin and Greek at the college, and her mother was the vibrant Deborah Fiske, of the “spending evenings folks.” Despite her frequent bouts with fatigue and persistent cough, Deborah was perennially cheerful, townspeople said. She thought nothing of inviting thirteen rowdy children to her house for games of blindman’s bluff and checkers, spooning out kind words and treats of raisins and nuts. But after spending her early years in Amherst schools, young Helen left to attend class away from home and only now returned briefly to Amherst on vacations. While Emily and Helen fondly remembered playing together under lilac bushes when they were six years old, Helen had grown into a handful and the two girls did not see much of each other anymore. Her mother with a mixture of pride and exasperation called Helen an “everlasting talker” who begged for the same stories to be told over and over again.⁵¹ “Helen learns very well,” she said, but “she is quite inclined to question the authority of everything: the Bible she says she does not feel as if it was true.”⁵² Once when Helen tried to get out of Latin exercises, she wrote her father an elaborate poem, including this self-assessment:

I’m but a child,

and rather wild,

As all the world doth know.

And this is why,

It seems so dry,

For me to study so.⁵³

Even though Helen’s father was a trustee of Amherst Academy and her mother an active supporter of all Amherst’s institutions, her parents determined their clever and imaginative daughter needed a steadier hand and absence from her mother’s illness at home. Helen went off to stay with friends in Hadley, then across the state in Charlestown, after that Pittsfield and Falmouth. She tested others’ patience as well, trying to be excused from Sunday school and bristling when she had to put down her books to do housework. On one sojourn away, Helen admitted she could be contrary. She could not promise to obey, she told her caretaker, but she would agree to try.⁵⁴ If Helen Fiske were presented as a cautionary tale to Emily, Sophia, Vinnie, and the other girls at Amherst Academy, it was as a lesson in deportment and the price paid for not following rules. But thinking about Abiah at her new school, Emily did not reject Helen Fiske’s example of independence. “I expect you have a great many prim, starched up young ladies there, who, I doubt not, are perfect models of propriety and good behavior,” she wrote. “Don’t let your free spirit be chained.”⁵⁵

There was more Emily could have said about Helen Fiske, but she chose not to—at least not in her letter that Sunday. As much as Emily appeared to tell Abiah everything she thought or did, there were emotions that touched her so deeply she told no one—or waited until the force of the blow had been absorbed to put words to her grief. The previous year had been difficult. Amherst experienced one death after another, with each person closer to Emily than the last. That winter Helen’s mother, suffering from consumption, appeared to be doing better. One morning she sat up in bed, dipped toast into her milk, and called for her husband and sister to join her. But before Professor Fiske could reach the bedroom, his wife was gone: one last gasp, neighbors said, and her eyes fixed in death. “The loss cannot be repaired,” Amherst College president Heman Humphrey said at her funeral.⁵⁶ For Emily, who already wondered how her rambunctious childhood friend could endure being away from home, she now imagined what it would be like to lose a mother. The thought terrified her. In March, Emily Fowler’s mother began failing. Everyone knew Harriet Fowler. She was Professor Fowler’s wife, the daughter of Noah Webster whose new dictionary Emily treasured, and a woman known for lively conversation and cultivated ways. On the day of Mrs. Fiske’s funeral, Harriet Fowler returned home from the service, complaining of exhaustion and chills. Within five weeks, she, too, was dead, and another Amherst girl was motherless. “Death is doing his work thoroughly in this place,” Principal Jeremiah Taylor said, and dismissed the academy early so that students could attend Mrs. Fowler’s service.⁵⁷

But of all the anguish the year before, Cousin Sophia’s illness was especially hard for Emily to bear. Sophia was in nearly every class with Emily, her home was down the street from the academy, and her father sold the Dickinsons dry goods and paint. That awful spring of 1844, Sophia began having chills, a fever, and complained of a headache. Then her fever soared and she became so weak, she could not get out of bed. All the signs pointed to typhus, a disease that hit children with ferocity. An epidemic had been raging in Washington, DC, and was creeping north to New England. When she heard of her cousin’s illness, Emily asked to see Sophia, and the physician permitted her a few moments to sit by the young girl’s bed. Emily visited often, studying Sophia’s face for signs of pain, recognition, submission, or perhaps faith. Then a fearful delirium set in. Sophia tossed, uttering scrambled words that only she could fathom. The scene was frightening for a child to witness and the doctor forbade Emily from entering the room. But when it looked as though Sophia’s death was imminent, he gave in, and allowed Emily one last look. She peered through an open door, took off her shoes, and stole into the room. Emily did not know exactly what to expect, but what she found surprised her. Sophia lay peacefully, mild and beautiful. Her pale features lit up, and on her lips an unearthly smile. There was no delirium, no difficult breathing: only motionless peace with eyes half-closed. Emily stared. It was not that looking at Sophia held some ghoulish attraction. Rather, she wanted to understand—to witness that skip of a moment between life and death. Friends outside the door worried; they thought she had been with Sophia long enough, and finally led Emily away. Days later when mourners laid Sophia in her coffin, Emily was overwhelmed with grief. Reverend Colton’s sermons gave no solace. Mourners’ promise of the afterlife offered little comfort. When she looked out the north window toward West Cemetery, only one thought entered Emily’s mind—Sophia was not coming back.⁵⁸

Edward and Emily Dickinson were alarmed by their daughter’s melancholy. When she was younger they had seen her through the gloom of colds and respiratory ailments, and a severe canker rash, but she had never been as somber as this. They wrote sturdy Aunt Lavinia in Boston for help. More than any other relative, Lavinia Norcross seemed to know what to do when someone was down-spirited. Not only was she forthright, as she had been to Edward about taking in boarders, she also was practical and believed meaningful activity was an antidote to sorrow. Within weeks Emily was in Boston staying with her aunt and uncle and their two-year-old daughter, Fanny. “We hope you are enjoying yourself,” Mrs. Dickinson wrote, “and that it will be a benefit to you to be away from home a little while.”⁵⁹ Aunt Lavinia knew what had sustained her: family, beauty, and art. She delighted in the city’s theatre, concerts, and horticultural shows, and music at the Bowdoin Street Church—she told the Dickinsons—simply melted her down. Emily stayed for more than a month, helping her aunt when even more relatives descended on her welcoming household. “Aunt Lavinia will really have quite a family,” Emily’s mother wrote. “I trust you will lend a helping hand.”⁶⁰ While Emily was away, her classmates stopped by the West Street house and asked Mrs. Dickinson how their friend was doing. She relayed their greetings. Edward, as usual, fretted. “Be careful about wetting your feet,” he told his elder daughter, “or taking cold—& not get lost.”⁶¹ With Austin back at school, young Vinnie appeared to be the only one at home not worried about her sister. She “gets along better without you, than I thought she would,” Mrs. Dickinson noted. Vinnie means to brave it out, her father added.⁶² After regaining her moorings, Emily returned to Amherst. Aunt Lavinia’s disposition had made an impression. She vowed to plunge into a year of improvement, made resolutions, and then berated herself for breaking some.⁶³ For a young girl, Emily keenly felt the passage of days, and was at turns philosophical and restless. She was determined to be more productive and use her time wisely.

On that warm August day, Emily peered at what she had written in her letter to Abiah and moved into her final sentences. There was barely an inch of space left on the page so she made her script smaller and more compact. “Why cant you pass Commencement here. I do wish you would.”⁶⁴ The rush of activity that came with the end of summer was about to descend. Days before, nearby Mount Holyoke Female Seminary celebrated its commencement. Amherst Academy would be next. The college would follow soon after. As Emily surveyed the words before her, she was dissatisfied. “I have looked my letter over and find I have written nothing worth reading. . . . Dont look at the writing and dont let any one see the letter.”⁶⁵ Her standards were high, and it was not by accident that she ended the letter with what was on her mind: her own writing. Emily indeed was changing, even if Charles Temple’s silhouette had traced only the edges. She heard anthems in the grass. She wanted weird and beautiful melodies to spring from her pen as well as from her piano. She wanted to break the rules like Helen Fiske. She wanted to understand the particles of moments that others could not see or grasped with a faith she found too easy. There were forces at work spinning Emily into a world her family and friends could not fully understand. I am the same old sixpence, she would tell Abiah—but she was not.⁶⁶ Possibility circled her young life like Professor Snell’s parhelion—a luminous circumference around a brilliant center. “I have no flowers before me as you had to inspire you,” she wrote Abiah.⁶⁷ Emily did not need them. Everything she required for inspiration already was taking root in her mind. It was confidence, independence, and self-awareness that were growing in her—qualities that would sustain her for the rest of her life. Emily dipped her pen into the dark well and began a sentence she had never written before. “All things are ready,” she wrote, and she knew it.⁶⁸

* Ebenezer Snell has the distinction of being the first student in the first class (1822) to graduate Amherst College. He also was the first college graduate to teach at Amherst Academy and the first alumnus to return to the college as a professor. His young Amherst Academy students initially gave him the nickname “Miss Snell.” [Frederick Tuckerman, Amherst Academy: A New England School of the Past, 1841–1861 (Amherst: Printed for the Trustees, 1929), 208–9.]

† Snell’s cloudiness scale ran from 1 to 10, with 10 being a cloud-covered day.

‡ Original spellings, misspellings, and errors in grammar—Dickinson’s and those of others as well—have been maintained throughout this text, and will not be called out as such.

§ Before Amherst Academy accepted females, most young girls attended Hannah White’s Amherst Female Seminary. A fire destroyed the seminary in 1838 and the institution closed. No doubt the closing of Amherst Female Seminary prompted academy trustees to open the door to girls as well as boys.

¶ Elizabeth Dickinson Currier (1823–1886) was the youngest sister of Edward Dickinson and a few years older than Emily. The poet often misspelled her aunt’s name with an s. Known for her strong personality, Elizabeth once earned Dickinson’s assessment as “the only male relative on the female side.” [L473.] Aunt Elizabeth also wrote poetry and contributed a verse history of the family for its 1883 reunion, praising Dickinson ancestors for being full of muscle and mind.

# Emily’s behavior as a young girl demonstrated this attitude. She would dutifully entertain guests, but then spend hours in her room after company had departed. Her frequent absence from church also underscored her desire for privacy.

** Sophia Holland was Dickinson’s second cousin on her father’s side. Perez Dickinson was Sophia’s maternal grandfather and Samuel Fowler Dickinson’s brother.

†† Smyrna is present-day Turkey.

‡‡ The executive director of the Emily Dickinson Museum, Jane Wald, says it is her understanding that when Dickinson as a girl refers to receiving or sending “papers,” she is talking about essays she had written for school or wrote on her own. [Email to author, September 30, 2015.]

§§ Emily Fowler Ford later remembered that the last copy she ever saw of Forest Leaves turned up at the Maplewood Institute in Pittsfield, Massachusetts. According to her, students in Pittsfield started a similar paper. For years, scholars have searched unsuccessfully for Forest Leaves. A small archives of the former Maplewood Institute is housed at the Berkshire County Historical Society. A search in those archives did not turn up the publication. [Will Garrison, email to the author, November 2, 2015.]