Two

IT IS HARD FOR ME TO GIVE UP THE WORLD

Sunday February 6, 1848 6 pm Barometer 29.12. Attached Therm. 64 degrees. Extern Therm. 26 degrees. Cloudiness 10. Winds NW 1 mph. Clouds Nimb. Snowfall 0 Remarks Some blustering. Snowing a little in pm.

—Ebenezer Snell, The Meteorological Journal Kept at Amherst College

Emily dreamed vivid dreams. She dreamed of planting a rye field with her mother, of the Amherst postmaster seizing her family’s property, of bees fighting for pond-lily stems, of a friend meeting Tennyson at a Boston publishing house, of standing before an audience and unveiling a statue. Once a sip of something before bedtime gave her what she called a sherbet dream. She noticed when she dreamed the same dream twice, three times, or night after night, and often told friends and family when they made an apparitional appearance. Sometimes her dreams were so insistent, Emily woke herself up, thinking she had to put on a shawl and hood to meet someone. She dreamed of growing old, her young face staring at her old face with a crown of silver hair—a grandame. “Dreams are couriers,” she once said. “Sometimes I wonder if I ever dreamed – then if I’m dreaming now, then if I always dreamed, and there is not a world.”¹

For months before beginning classes, Emily dreamed of Mount Holyoke Female Seminary. “It has been in my thought by day, and my dreams by night,” she told her friend Abiah. “You cannot imagine how much I am anticipating in entering there.”² The idea of furthering her education after Amherst Academy excited Emily and the new seminary—then in its eleventh year—already was known for attracting ambitious young women from as far away as Montreal and St. Louis. The four-story building rose out of the center of South Hadley, Massachusetts, like a monolith, dwarfing everything around it, including the church next door. When founder Mary Lyon drew up plans for the school, supporters urged her to name it Mary Lyon’s School, but she found the idea boastful. The seminary should be named for something as vital and enduring as education itself, she argued. She studied maps of the surrounding landscape, of the rugged Metacomet Ridge that ran like a spine down the Connecticut River valley. One prominent point, Mount Holyoke, rose 935 feet above farmland. While not the highest peak, its formidable foundation appealed to her. The mountain was carved from seismic shifts that ripped North America from Africa and Eurasia. Its rock—the product of molten lava—was among the most ancient on the planet. Mary Lyon liked the association: a seminary forged by volcanoes.³

“I fear I am anticipating too much, and that some freak of fortune may overturn all my airy schemes,” Emily told her friend Abiah. Disappointment was in her nature, she said, acknowledging her dreams might be capsized by something unexpected or her own change of heart.⁴ As cautious as she told herself to be, Emily was ready for the next step toward adulthood, and looked forward to time away from Amherst—even if “away” meant only eleven miles down the road. When she thought about what she would find at Mount Holyoke, she could tick off predictions with the certainty of someone who was well prepared. She expected hard work and an energetic community of young women. She expected teachers more experienced than the academy’s young staff—seasoned educators devoted to a lifetime of learning and serious scholars themselves. She also expected rules. With hundreds of young women living under one roof with their teachers, orderliness had to be maintained. The seminary’s list of regulations was long: do not throw anything out the windows, do not close doors, do not delay in the hallway, do not leave lamps burning upon retiring, use pumps properly, devote time to compositions, do not be absent from church. She would follow the rules—mostly—and knew that the formidable Miss Lyon was in charge of the whole teeming enterprise.* Emily also understood she would be on her own—away from home for the longest period of her young life. In February now—six months since entering the seminary—she had come to two important decisions. She realized she did not want to become a teacher. As much as she loved learning, instructing others held no interest. At Amherst Academy when teachers had asked her to rise and read her compositions, she felt uncomfortable in front of others. She also recognized she could never be a missionary. Many Mount Holyoke graduates set out on their own as missionaries to Salonica, Ceylon, and Ningpo. But Emily did not feel the call, and the idea of travel far away from Amherst was unthinkable. She was focused on one more decision, too, a far more serious resolution than those about teaching and missionary work. That decision was not yet clear to Emily and would not be until later in the day, when she was scheduled to meet with Miss Lyon herself.⁵ She knew why Mary Lyon wanted to see her. She wanted to talk about God. No one would ever confront Emily so emphatically about the state of her soul.

Some Amherst townspeople may have questioned the decision to send Emily to Mount Holyoke Female Seminary. After all, when she’d joined the incoming class that previous September, she was only sixteen—young by seminary standards. Mary Lyon had raised entrance requirements every year and she did not want immature students unable to handle the work. The seminary was bursting, larger than Amherst College by nearly 100 students. Miss Lyon had rejected more pupils than she accepted, and was forced to hire additional teachers. Emily’s academic training at Amherst Academy—while enriching—had been sporadic. Like many students, girls in particular, she sat out school terms when her parents worried about her health: a cough that lingered for weeks; complaints of a raw throat, a bout with what her father called influenzy. It irritated Emily to be absent from the academy as she had the year before she entered Mount Holyoke. “It cost me many a severe struggle to leave my studies & to be considered an invalid,” she complained.⁶ For months, she had sulked around the house and helped her mother, learning to bake bread—her sleeves rolled up, mixing flour and milk. She grew to enjoy baking, but housekeeping was a plague to her. Occasionally she sought escape from her imposed “exile”—as she called it—in carriage rides and roaming the fields alone.⁷ During the time she was absent from the academy, there had been another restorative trip to Boston to visit her aunt and uncle. Aunt Lavinia had trooped Emily around the city with her usual enthusiasm. They took in Bunker Hill, Mount Auburn Cemetery, a horticultural exhibition, two concerts, and climbed to the top of the Massachusetts State House for a view of the city. Emily especially enjoyed the Chinese Museum, where two scholars—one a professor of music and another a teacher of writing—practiced their art for curious onlookers. “There is something peculiarly interesting to me in their self denial,” she said.⁸

Not all parents were like the Dickinsons, who believed their daughters deserved an education. Many families thought educating young women was a waste of time. Why educate girls beyond the age of fifteen, they argued. Certainly a cultivated mother needed to provide a proper learning environment for her children, but academy schooling was sufficient. When daughters ended up marrying and staying at home, it was unnecessary for them to proceed with an advanced curriculum. Besides, an education was expensive; a year at Mount Holyoke cost $60—much more than Edward had paid for Emily at the academy. Even Emily’s aunt, Mary Dickinson, thought women’s higher education was foolish. “They have so little business to do in this town,” she once huffed, “they are undertaking to build a Female Seminary.”† ⁹ However, while no one ever would call Edward Dickinson a champion of women’s education, he did want the best for his daughters, and a commitment to learning ran deep on both the Dickinson and Norcross sides of the family. Emily’s maternal grandfather, Joel Norcross, was one of the founders of Monson Academy at the same time Samuel Fowler Dickinson was getting Amherst Academy off the ground. Emily’s mother and Aunt Lavinia had attended Monson, and later Mr. Herrick’s School for Girls in New Haven, Connecticut, where young women regularly attended lectures at Yale. A woman’s life should have a serious purpose, young Emily Norcross long ago wrote in a Monson Academy composition. There is satisfaction in contemplation and retirement, she had written, seclusion based not on what is lost but what is gained.¹⁰

Even darker concerns abounded about educating young women: fears about their health, womanhood, and safety. Many detractors, including at least one Harvard professor, thought too much reading and writing drained blood from a young woman’s brain particularly during her catamenial period. Women and men were different, he said. Women have a finite amount of energy and should expend it wisely. “With every act of life . . . the uttering of a word, the coining of a thought, the thrill of an emotion, there is a destruction of a certain number of cells.”¹¹ If women spent too much time at their desks, they ran the risk of never being able to have children. Some ministers warned their religious colleagues not to associate with Mary Lyon. The editor of The Religious Magazine took the argument one step further, declaring that Miss Lyon’s work undercut the very foundation of society, producing masculine women out to supplant men. “In the place of all which is most attractive female manners, we see characters expressly formed by acting a manly part upon the theater of life,” he wrote.¹² Then there were those who believed Mary Lyon and Mount Holyoke Female Seminary put ideas in girls’ heads: ideas about ambition and living lives far different from their mothers. Celia Wright of Blandford, Massachusetts, was one of those girls; Emily knew her through Amherst friends. Celia had graduated Mount Holyoke the year before Emily entered and dreamed of traveling west for missionary work with Choctaw Indians. Her father disapproved. He thought the work was dangerous and did not want his daughter so far away from home. But Celia was defiant and flatly announced she would go. That’s what you get, Dr. Wright may have thought, from someone like Mary Lyon who urged young women to “accomplish great things.”¹³ When Emily’s Amherst friend called on the Wright family, she felt tension between father and daughter. Someone had been crying. Later a seminary teacher recorded the whereabouts of recent 1846 graduates. “Celia S. Wright,” she wrote in a column of names, “to the Indians.”¹⁴

Edward and Emily Norcross Dickinson did not worry about fifty-year-old Mary Lyon planting preposterous ideas in their daughter’s head. Edward did have apprehensions about Emily being away from home, of course, but they were his usual worries about eyestrain from reading too much, and unease about his daughter being in charge of her own money for the first time. “Tell Father, I am obliged to him much, for his offers of ‘picauniary’ assistance, but do not need any,” she instructed Austin.¹⁵ Mrs. Dickinson checked to see if Emily had enough shoe blacking and boxed-up treats to be delivered when the family made an occasional visit. She knew Emily had a sweet tooth and sent gingerbread, a cake, and a pie. Fruit and chestnuts, she probably realized, would remain untouched for days. If they needed any reassurance about Mary Lyon’s aims, the Dickinsons had only to look to relatives and friends who supported her. Early on when Miss Lyon put out a call for help with seminary furnishings, Grandfather Norcross had readily supplied the crockery.‡ Amherst College president Edward Hitchcock and his wife, Orra, had invited Miss Lyon to board with them while she put finishing touches on her dream. Edward Hitchcock said being around Mary Lyon made the wise wiser and the good better.¹⁶ He would do anything for her, including serving as a Mount Holyoke trustee and giving the seminary his old anatomy mannequin that he so loved showing Amherst Academy students. His wife helped too. A skilled artist, Orra had sketched a biblical vignette that the seminary adopted for its seal. The landscape—resembling Mount Zion—suggested Mount Holyoke Female Seminary was a place where women would be raised up.¹⁷

The seminary seal would have appealed to the Dickinsons. It reassured them that Emily’s education would be grounded in the same Christian principles as Amherst College. Emily’s mother already had pledged her life to Christ in 1831—the only member of family yet to do so.§ Her father had not professed, but regularly attended First Church, where he also served on parish committees and helped search for suitable ministers.^¶ Like her parents and grandparents, Emily knew that Christianity was tightly woven into the everyday life for students at colleges such as Amherst, Yale, Harvard, and Princeton, and female seminaries like Mount Holyoke. Faculty led student prayer groups, roommates encouraged one another to consider conversion, the curriculum was infused with biblical study, and religious revivals were a frequent and serious occurrence. President Hitchcock once remarked that religion was at the very core of Amherst College.¹⁸ Area newspapers shared his point of view. In reporting on commencements at Amherst and Mount Holyoke, newspapers listed students who read prizewinning essays as well as the number of seniors who had professed their faith. To be a college or seminary student in New England meant to be a student of faith as well. Edward Dickinson knew firsthand how deeply religion weighed on students’ minds. He could remember walking past doorways of student lodging in New Haven and hearing young men’s prayers. He kept letters his parents wrote—letters imploring him to take advantage of Yale’s revivals and pledge his life to Christ.# Samuel and Lucretia Dickinson counted the number of Amherst College students who had professed, rejoiced when one of their son’s friends joined the fold, and used student professions to prompt Edward’s own. Even more than studying, listen to the sound of God around you, his mother had urged. It is “the most important of all calls.”¹⁹

Emily had not received letters from her parents about professing her faith. As they had when she was home, Edward and Emily Norcross Dickinson left the subject of Christian conversion to their daughter and did not pressure her. But the routines at Mount Holyoke made it nearly impossible for Emily to keep her thoughts about religion private. She had to take a stand on faith and she had to do it publicly. During her first month at the seminary, Miss Lyon had asked students to declare their status. Students came forward and identified themselves in one of three ways: those who already had professed, those who were considering a hope in Christ, and those who did not feel a call. Emily was in the latter group—those without hope. She was not the only one. Seventy-nine other young women—nearly a third of the seminary—had joined her. During church services, the large group of “no hopers”—as they were called—sat together every Sunday, a stark physical reminder to themselves and others of their spiritual state. But there were other times during the day when Emily could disappear into her own solitary space and turn over thoughts. As public and communal as the seminary was, Mary Lyon valued solitude and believed it was critical to young women’s development. If she’d had her way, Miss Lyon would have built the seminary with private rooms for every Mount Holyoke student. Finances precluded the option, so she settled for “lighted closets”—individual spaces in each room where a young woman could separate from her roommate and have time to pray or think. When Emily wanted to be alone, the lighted closet was a refuge. No one would know if she spoke to God or let her thoughts glide elsewhere to words, images, and poetry.²⁰

While Emily took the question of faith seriously, it did not diminish her attention to academics at Mount Holyoke. She was doing well. Before she entered the seminary, she had reviewed arithmetic in order to be to be on the “safe side of things,” she had said.²¹ During those first weeks back in September, Emily had passed all her examinations—a notable accomplishment for someone so young. Many students were not as prepared: some had been sent home for failing marks or for not completing the three days of exams on time. A few left because they were homesick. Emily’s test scores placed her into the first class level. By the middle of the term, she had advanced to the next rung. With three levels of classes at Mount Holyoke, it was possible Emily could complete her studies and graduate in two years rather than the usual three. That is, if she wanted to. The majority of students did not, although her roommate, cousin Emily Norcross, was an exception. Cousin Emily was in her final year at the seminary and looked forward to work as a music teacher somewhere out west. With both of her parents deceased, Cousin Emily knew she would need to support herself, and teaching was her future.** But most parents and many students looked upon a year or two at Mount Holyoke as the final step in a young woman’s education—a “finishing stroke,” Emily said.²² Emily’s childhood friend Helen Fiske had wanted nothing more than to attend Mount Holyoke and had spent months reviewing her subjects, especially—like Emily—her ciphering. Helen’s father worried that his daughter was studying with such intensity that she was neglecting her duties to others. He spoke with Mount Holyoke’s assistant principal, Mary Whitman, about his concerns. Either Miss Whitman had persuaded him that Helen should not attend Mount Holyoke—at least not right away—or he had decided himself. Professor Fiske determined Ipswich Female Seminary would be better for his daughter, saying it provided “less stimulus to intellectual effort.”²³ Emily knew she was fortunate to be accepted at Mount Holyoke, and realized it was too soon to be talking about successfully completing all her classes and graduating. Besides, the first year for every student, no matter what level, was probationary. For now, she enjoyed sharing a room with her cousin, singing in the seminary chorus, taking piano lessons, and making the most of her studies in botany, rhetoric, physiology, ecclesiastical history, astronomy, and algebra. She boasted to Austin after she had completed each course, and announced to him when she delved into chemistry, Mary Lyon’s principal subject. “Your welcome letter found me all engrossed in the history of Sulphuric Acid,” she wrote, adding five exclamation points.²⁴

Not only had she done well in her classes, Emily also had adjusted to the seminary’s bustling environment. At times it felt like she was living in a beehive: swarms of students and teachers buzzed about the building, each with schedules, chores, and places to go. Few seminaries existed that were as large and complex an operation as Mount Holyoke. Every action had to be systematically organized and assessed for effectiveness. As was her custom, Mary Lyon kept track of it all. She compiled lists of students absent overnight, notes on sweeping, care of sink pumps, and inventoried the kitchen contents: one spinning wheel, one blue tub, one meat barrel, one cheese strayner. She marked who was ill and needed mayweed tea. Nowhere was Mount Holyoke’s organizational bearing more apparent than in domestic work. In order to keep costs of the school down, avoid hiring outside help, and teach the values of self-reliance and equality, Miss Lyon created a domestic work requirement. Each student worked at least an hour every day on chores that contributed to the “family.” Some young women prepared puddings, others ironed tablecloths, several helped out in the sick room, and a group of copyists sent off a journal letter to former students who were missionaries abroad. There were 235 jobs for 235 students. Miss Lyon was adamant that parents not associate domestic work with academics, and stated her policy in the annual seminary catalogue: “All members of the school aid to some extent in the domestic work of the family. The portion of time thus occupied, is so small that it does not retard their progress in study, but rather facilitates it by its invigorating influences. But it is no part of the design of this Seminary to teach young ladies domestic work. This branch of Education is exceedingly important, but a literary institution is not the place to gain it. Home is the proper place for the daughters of the country to be taught on this subject; and the mother is the appropriate teacher.”²⁵ After learning she would not be attending Mount Holyoke, Helen Fiske justified her disappointment by disparaging the seminary as a place “to learn to make hasty pudding and clean gridirons.”²⁶ But Emily did not mind the chores. “My domestic work is not difficult,” she wrote Abiah, “& consists in carrying the Knives from the 1st tier of tables at morning & noon & at night washing & wiping the same quantity of Knives.”²⁷ Students made light work of their chores, singing as they cooked, needling their classmates for washing dishes “after the manner of the Pharises!,” and humorously naming their work circles for lofty church organizations. The dishwashers were known as the American Board.²⁸ Those scrubbing the baking dishes were the Home Missionary Society. A joke among the domestic groups was Mary Lyon’s unending reconfiguration of the dining room. She always looked for a better arrangement to promote efficiency. Around Mount Holyoke, the sound of Miss Lyon moving tables was as constant as the boil of bubbling stew pots.

Nearly every student at one time or another wrote home about Mary Lyon. She was everywhere, they said. Up at five a.m. in her wrapper to check on breakfast, setting buckets of disinfectant in the hallways to ward off illness, shepherding students into coaches for mountain hikes in the fresh air. With everything she had to do—or thought she had to do—she believed focus was key. “Try to be systematic,” she lectured the young women. All her life, she told them, she suffered from what she called “regular habits.” They had to do better. She warned them about interruptions to their thinking and drains on their time. “I really think it requires more discipline of mind and more grace to meet a lady’s duties than a gentleman’s,” she argued. “He has little minutia to attend to. He can rise in the morning and go to his business without hindrance, but it is not so with a lady.”²⁹ Mary Lyon’s command did not escape Emily’s notice. Joking with Austin about South Hadley’s isolation, she cast Miss Lyon as a military general, leading a charge, and urging her troops to fight back. “Do you know any nation about to besiege South Hadley?” Emily wrote. “If so, do inform me of it, for I would be glad of a chance to escape, if we are to be stormed. I suppose Miss Lyon. would furnish us all with daggers & order us to fight for our lives, in case such perils should befall us.”³⁰ Over and over again students commented on the intensity with which Miss Lyon approached her work. “I wish you could see Miss Lyon,” one of Emily’s classmates wrote home. “I know you would laugh. She is hard of hearing, has false teeth, wears a cap, and dresses as well as an old washwoman. Yet she is noble for doing business. She runs around here with her nose dripping and does more business than any two men.”³¹ She is, another student observed, such a “driver and hurrier. There is no standing still where she is.”³² What some saw as rush, Emily might have seen differently. It was not so much hurry that defined Mary Lyon, but urgency. Emily felt it in herself. A year earlier, during her self-proclaimed year of improvement, Emily told Abiah “life is short and time fleeting” and she wanted to “spend the year. . . . to better advantage.”³³ She, too, was driven, and searching for ways to make her dreams take shape.³⁴ Whether a commitment to God was part of that plan remained uncertain. But she knew that within hours she would need to make up her mind.

Emily was not the only young woman who was imagining her future. Her classmate Sarah Worcester from Park Hill in the Cherokee Nation was already in conversation with tribal officials about opening a school for girls. Margaret Robertson from Sherbrook, Canada, wanted to write a novel. Louisa Plimpton from Sturbridge, Massachusetts, dreamed of going to China.†† Fidelia Fiske, Helen’s distant cousin, earlier had embarked on her own adventure. During afternoon assembly in Seminary Hall, teachers read aloud from Fidelia’s letters, praising her bravery and determination. They told the young women about how Fidelia had started Mount Holyoke in 1839, but contracted typhoid and was forced to leave. How she’d returned several years later and had finished her studies. When a foreign missions board had announced an opportunity to go to Persia, Fidelia jumped at the chance, and set sail from Boston Harbor. Four months later, she arrived in Orumiyeh, where she learned Persian and laid plans for a girls’ school modeled on Mount Holyoke. “My dream breathes not yet,” Fidelia had written her friends at the seminary. “But I hope that bone is coming to bone.”³⁵ Everywhere around Emily women were taking risks. She knew Miss Lyon insisted that students learn chemistry not from reading books but by conducting laboratory experiments. After a teacher burned her hands when a test went awry, the solution was simply to search for a bandage, not abandon the scientific attempt. You learn by trial and error, analysis and contemplation. When something didn’t work, Miss Lyon believed, you tried again. Trust your own mind, she always said. Once students had taken to the fields to collect flowers for analysis. They had been so zealous in gathering samples, teachers asked them to temporarily suspend their collecting. Faculty worried there would be no blossoms left. In spring when the snow cleared, Emily would be out in the field again, searching for fossil tracks and evidence of long-ago dinosaurs. Hearing about Fidelia’s ambition and being called upon to use her own powers of observation made Emily think about what was ahead for her. Time and again during the year, she introduced herself to new classmates, young women who had never heard of the Dickinsons of Amherst. She thought of these introductions as giving her “dimensions.”³⁶ The introductions forced her to reconsider who she was, what her narrative had been, and what it would become. There was something emancipating about being herself and not solely the daughter of Edward Dickinson. Before long she was signing her letters “Emilie” and wondering if—like Fidelia—she had the independence and courage to set sail.³⁷

Of course, for Emily and the other students no woman was a more imposing model of determination than Mary Lyon. In founding the seminary and keeping it afloat, Miss Lyon knew better than anyone the forces against her. She spent hours every day drafting letters to would-be donors and spooling out worries to her friends. This seminary is up against so much, she had written, it has nine chances out of ten of failing. Her words filled pages with lines crossed out, phrases added, words stacked one atop another, and scrawls written up along the sides. In a draft of one difficult sentence about women’s education, she had stated, “We must cheerfully endure opposition,” then deleted with a heavy dark line the words that followed—words about enemies to the cause. It incensed her that she had to follow expectations for what women should do: she should not travel alone, she should not directly ask for money, she should not lead meetings where men were present. “My heart is sick my soul is pained with this empty gentility, this gentile nothingness,” she once fumed to a friend. “I am doing a great work. I cannot come down.” She complained of headaches and had spells of erysipelas that turned her skin as taut and as hard as an orange rind.‡‡ That November day back in 1837, when Mount Holyoke Female Seminary opened its doors for the first time, Mary Lyon wanted everything to be perfect, but it wasn’t. The front steps were not in place, windows were still without blinds, stoves sat unconnected to their stovepipes, furniture had been delayed by storms, and no one could find the new bedding. The first sight that greeted many students was Trustee Daniel Safford on hands and knees setting up bedsteads. “We are in glorious confusion,” he enthusiastically declared. By nightfall, South Hadley townswomen could be seen walking through the huckleberry patch with supplies, their arms filled with donated sheets and blankets.³⁸

As much as Mary Lyon inspired young women to be independent, she also made clear that one matter took precedence: Christianity. She believed that the purpose of life was a commitment to Christ. Yet she also understood the weight of the question Emily was confronting. While Miss Lyon thought a profession of faith was necessary to everlasting life, she recognized that making the decision was not a casual one. It was better to wrestle with the question seriously, she said, rather than mindlessly profess to believe. Besides she had not professed her own faith until she was twenty-five—older than Emily and most other students. Some might have argued that if religion were so important, Mount Holyoke should not have accepted conflicted students like Emily or asked them to leave after a term if they still had not professed. Yale, for example, threatened to expel students who did not believe the Bible was God’s word.³⁹ But expelling students who did not profess to believe missed the point, Miss Lyon would have said. Young women should make up their own minds and come to the Church freely.

Since Christmas in 1847, religious questioning at the seminary had intensified. Like Amherst College, Mount Holyoke decided to spend December 25 in voluntary fasting and prayer. Emily had expected changes in spending her first Christmas away from home, but the seminary’s decision to embrace such austerity was nothing she’d ever experienced. Holidays at home were filled with laughter and she enjoyed making a list of her Christmas bounty: a perfume bag, a sheet of music, a china mug with a Forget me not upon it, a watch case, an amaranthine stock of pincushions, candy.⁴⁰ Nearly every Mount Holyoke student observed the fast. Emily spent the day in church, prayer meetings, and had more time than usual to be alone. After morning services, Miss Lyon invited all who felt a call to Christ to place a sealed note in her note box. Fifty attended. “The house has been very still,” one teacher observed. “I hardly heard one ‘Merry Christmas’ this morning.”⁴¹

Around that time, Hannah Porter, a friend of Emily’s maternal grandfather, had been staying at the seminary. Deacon Porter, Hannah’s husband, was one of the seminary’s most valued trustees. Mrs. Porter was always interested in the spiritual health of students and kept an eye on Emily’s development, since she was well acquainted with her family. When she returned home to Monson, she received a letter from Cousin Emily Norcross. “Emily Dickinson appears no different,” the young woman reported. She “says she has no particular objection to becoming a Christian and she says she feels bad when she hears of one and another of her friends who are experiencing a hope but still she feels no more interest.”⁴² Emily Dickinson had known her roommate was writing and had asked her cousin to relay her best wishes to Mrs. Porter. She also promised to write herself and perhaps explain her views, but failed to do so. With the first term near its end, Emily was short on time, she said.⁴³

The Mount Holyoke term concluded in January 1848, and Emily enjoyed a two-week recess at home. On Sunday, February 6, she was back at school, and the seminary whirled into action. That evening before supper, young women again spread fresh white linen cloths over the long tables and Emily set the knives beside each plate. It may have been difficult to keep her mind on the task. The scheduled meeting with Miss Lyon was only an hour away: that is, her second meeting. Even though she appeared to have told no one, Emily had first met with Mary Lyon right before the recess. Back in January seventeen students who were considering a profession of faith met with Miss Lyon privately in her rooms—Emily among them. Miss Lyon led the young women through a discussion of Acts, then assigned homework. During the recess, she said, memorize John 6.35: the passage that begins “I am the bread of life.” When you return, she told them, we will hear where you stand.⁴⁴ After that January meeting, Emily had written Abiah and alluded to what was going through her mind. “This term is the longest in the year,” she said. “I love this Seminary & all the teachers are bound strongly to my heart by ties of affection. There are many sweet girls here & dearly do I love some new faces, but I have not yet found the place of a few dear ones filled, nor would I wish it to be here.” Emily reported on her studies and how much she enjoyed chemistry and physiology. In a long postscript, she inquired of mutual friends and commented on the unseasonably warm weather. Between the two remarks, Emily had inserted an aside—brief and vague—hinting at what had transpired hours before. “There is a great deal of religious interest here and many are flocking to the ark of safety,” she wrote. “I have not yet given up to the claims of Christ, but trust I am not entirely thoughtless on so important & serious a subject.”⁴⁵

The recess between terms had given Emily time to think. As a girl, she once had joined a prayer group but had stopped attending. Prayer had become—as she put it—“irksome”—and did not sustain her interest.⁴⁶ Recently Amherst had experienced a town revival and neighbors flocked to church meetings. Emily remembered the revival well—and uncharitably. She recalled watching those who had “sneered loudest” at religion suddenly professing their faith. “They were melted at once,” she said. The comment underscored her wariness: conversions often looked impulsive to her—the product of overexcitement rather than belief.⁴⁷ When converts such as Abiah had spoken of their spiritual contentment, Emily was envious, but also skeptical. She thought accepting religious maxims meant abdicating independence and not personally struggling with profound questions. It was like learning chemistry by a book rather than an experiment.

After that first dinner of the new term, Mary Lyon retired to her rooms to prepare for the meeting with Emily and the others. Before the break, she had asked the young women if they felt lost—adrift without a profession of faith. She hoped the time away from the seminary would make their answers clear. Lately Mary Lyon had also been reading about Noah and his search for a rare place where he could hear God. She wanted her students to find their own singular place.⁴⁸ Miss Lyon took up the notes that students had dropped into her box and read through them. Of the seventeen who had attended the meeting before vacation, a few said they would not be attending tonight’s gathering. She made note of the numbers and checked off who would and who would not be joining her.

As the minutes ticked down, Emily finished her chores in the dining hall. She plunged her hands into hot water and drew a towel across each thin knife blade. Then she went upstairs to the main floor and walked past the mineral cabinet with its shelves of rocks and fossils. Miss Lyon’s rooms were behind the double parlors and across from Seminary Hall. Emily could remember the many words Mary Lyon had spoken there. “Don’t be a hypocrite,” she had told them, “be honest.” “Distinguish between what is very difficult and what is impossible. Do what is difficult.” “The difference between great and small minds is the power of classification. Little minds dwell on particular things. Great minds take in a great deal.” “If you have as much intelligence, energy, and enterprise as you ought to have, you are making much of yourself. Do something. Have a plan. Live for a purpose.”⁴⁹ Emily looked around her. No one else had a private room on the main floor. Miss Lyon’s was there because she wanted to answer if someone knocked at the big seminary door. Last month, when Emily had walked into Mary Lyon’s rooms, her keen eye took in everything: a worn copy of Gorham’s Chemistry, Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, Miss Lyon’s Bible—the pages smooth and bare without a single mark from her hand.⁵⁰ On her desk were sheets of writing Lyon had composed deep into the night: lists, letters, drafts, appeals, journals, catalogs, lesson plans, recipes. The shuffled surface of her desk was like a map of her mind: a searching intellect, insatiable, and alive with ideas. Mary Lyon and Emily were alike in so many ways, and in so many ways they were not. While Miss Lyon wanted to wrestle down the unknown and tame it with lists and order and systems, Emily wanted to stare it down and walk straight into the abyss. Emily did not want to live by anyone else’s rules, not even the rules of the Church, and the questions for her never stopped. “Does not Eternity appear dreadful to you,” she once asked Abiah. “I often get thinking of it and it seems so dark to me that I almost wish there was no Eternity. To think that we must forever live and never cease to be. It seems as if Death which all so dread because it launches us upon an unknown world would be a releif to so endless a state of existence.”⁵¹

That evening Emily did not pause outside Mary Lyon’s door, and she did not leave a note. She kept on walking. Darkness flooded her student room. She could barely make out George Smith’s Hotel and Livery Stable across the road, and she could not see the town cemetery at all. Cousin Emily was late in returning for the term, and the room felt empty and lonely. It had been a blustery day. Low, dense clouds spread across the sky and snowflakes flew past her window on their way to the ground. A few days before, a storm had dumped eight inches of snow and tree trunks were still lined in white. Miss Lyon had asked Emily Dickinson if she felt lost. She did not. Emily knew where she was. She was as rooted to the soil beneath her feet as was one of her wildflower specimens. In church services the minister asked Christianity’s central question: Are you willing to give up the world for everlasting life? Emily knew her answer. No, she thought. Amherst, her family, and the deep mud of March were more sacred to her than any religious doctrine. She would not trade the friends she had, the natural world she loved, or the verses that were beginning to thread through her mind for anything, including the promise of everlasting life. It was here and now that she lived for, not the possibility of eternal salvation—if that even existed. It is hard for me to give up the world, she thought.⁵²

For months, Emily had tried to reconcile Mary Lyon’s great teachings about independence and ambition with the call to faith. She could not seem to square Miss Lyon’s injunction to use one’s own mind with her appeal to join the flock. The two precepts seemed at odds with each other: incompatible and dissonant. But then she understood. Emily realized that categories of faith did not fit her: “professors of religion,” “those who have a hope,” “no-hopers.” They were too neat. Her mind told her to reject classifications and shun categories. She made her decision: she had discovered a way to take religion seriously while also remaining independent. She neither accepted faith nor rejected it. Emily decided to continue questioning.§§ “I am standing alone in rebellion,” Emily would write a few years later. Four years before her death, she remained unchanged. I “both believe, and disbelieve a hundred times an Hour,” she said.⁵³

Mary Lyon’s meeting was still going on downstairs as the young women on Emily’s hallway made preparations for the next day. The morning bell would rouse everyone especially early. When the sun came up, Mount Holyoke Female Seminary would begin new classes for the spring term. Deacon Porter would soon arrive to collect tuition, and later on Professor Snell would travel down from Amherst College to deliver a lecture on electricity. Already Margaret Robertson from Canada was thinking about a new composition, trying to imagine life in 1948. In a few days, Mr. Judd, a friend of Miss Lyon’s, would appear with his sleigh and take students for a ride. Miss Lyon loved racing along the frozen river and disappearing into a whirling squall.⁵⁴ Everyone would soon settle into the old track with recitations, reviews of ancient history, algebra problems, chemistry experiments, and more letters in Seminary Hall from the intrepid Fidelia Fiske. Emily knew she would never set out for Persia or teach Choctaw Indians. She now realized her travel would take her elsewhere. Whether she knew it then or not, she would bore into her own interior, confronting an unknown as wild and uncertain as any new world a missionary had seen. A place as rare as Noah’s. Right now, if she squinted and looked far to the northwest, she could almost see that volcanic summit—Mount Holyoke—sitting dreamlike against the night sky.

Downstairs, the prayer meeting had ended. With all the young women in their rooms for silent study hours, Miss Lyon sat alone with her books and her lists and the pulsing exhaustion of her own vision. She drew out a pen to record which students had joined her that night. Five new ones attended, she wrote. One was not there who had been before, she added. She left no note, however.⁵⁵

* Emily’s infractions included reading and working after the retiring bell, writing letters during silent study hours, and asking to visit her Amherst home on the Sabbath—a violation of seminary rules, which Mount Holyoke’s assistant principal, Mary Whitman, sternly pointed out to her.

† Mary Dickinson probably was speaking of Hannah White’s Amherst Female Seminary, which opened in 1832 and closed after a fire in 1838.

‡ Among Mary Lyon’s papers from the early years of the seminary is a note from Daniel Safford clearing up an order of crockery from Joel Norcross: “Mr. Norcross understood that you were to write for more crockery or glass on your return,” Safford wrote in 1844, “consequently he had not sent what you ordered.” Norcross quickly made good on the request, as Safford informed Lyon: “Crockery with the article from Mr. Whiteman, the tongue in a half barrel, the dryed Beef in a bag, a two gallon jug of temperance Wine for Mr. Condit (which you will please inform him of) all go to the depot today.” [Daniel Safford to Mary Lyon, July 16, 1844, Mary Lyon Collection, Mount Holyoke College Archives and Special Collections.]

§ “Professors” of faith in the nineteenth-century Congregational Church declared a personal testament of belief and commitment to Jesus Christ. Their profession of faith indicated that they had evidence of a personal experience that changed and deepened their relationship with Christ. Men made a public statement of belief. It is unclear if women, such as Emily’s mother, who professed her faith at First Church, made a similar public statement. [Jane Eberwein, email to the author, March 12, 2016.]

¶ Members who were professed Christians made up the church’s inner group. Parish members who had not professed were permitted to make decisions about finances and secular business such as hiring ministers. [Alfred Habegger, My Wars Are Laid Away in Books: The Life of Emily Dickinson (New York: Random House, 2001), 80, 81, 125.]

# Congregationalism was the largest denomination in Massachusetts, and the faith embraced by the Dickinson family, Amherst College, and Mount Holyoke Female Seminary. Jane Eberwein states that First Church of Amherst, which the Dickinsons attended, endorsed a Congregational faith with recognizable roots in the New England Puritan tradition, but could no longer be considered Puritan. Theology, she states, had been softened by the Antinomianism that made Emily Dickinson’s situation more difficult. It posited that a person could choose a commitment to Christ rather than needing to wait for Christ to choose who would be saved. [Jane Eberwein, email to the author, April 12, 2016.]

** Emily Norcross’s parents were Amanda Brown and Hiram Norcross, Emily Norcross Dickinson’s eldest brother. Hiram died when his daughter was an infant. Her mother remarried and moved to Springfield, Massachusetts. Emily and her brother were shuttled among relatives, living for a while with their Norcross grandparents, with Aunt Lavinia in Boston, and spent holidays with the Dickinsons in Amherst.

†† In 1851 Cherokee chief William P. Ross toured Mount Holyoke and spoke with Worcester and fellow student Ellen Whitmore about working with him. The Cherokee National Female Seminary opened on May 7, 1851, with Whitmore as principal and Worcester as assistant teacher. Robinson became a novelist, most notably of Christie Redfern’s Troubles. [Carrie MacMillan, Lorraine McMuller, and Elizabeth Waterson, Silenced Sextet: Six Nineteenth-Century Canadian Women Novelists (Montreal: McGill-Queens University Press, 1992), 89.] Louisa Plimpton became a missionary in Foochow, China. [Sarah D. (Locke) Stow, History of Mount Holyoke Seminary, South Hadley, Mass. During Its First Half Century, 1837–1887 (Springfield, Mass: Mount Holyoke Seminary, 1887), 322.]

‡‡ Erysipelas is a bacterial infection brought on by an insect bite or a cut. It is now easily treated with antibiotics.

§§ Jane Eberwein argues that Dickinson “withdrew increasingly from communal religious ritual—not because she ceased questing for God . . . but because she was probably the only person she knew who felt impelled to continue the quest . . . she never felt that assurance of salvation for which she yearned even as it evaded her intensely inquiring ironic mind.” [Jane Eberwein, Dickinson: Strategies of Limitation (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1985), 182.] Eberwein also notes that the phrase “give up the world” did not appear in Amherst’s First Church’s 1834 Articles of Faith & Government. That document asserts on page 7 that professed Christians should not attend balls, races, theatre, engage in gambling, travel on a Sunday for business or pleasure, or “make use of ardent spirits, except as medicine.” Eberwein suggests that Dickinson would have understood those edicts and other precepts as abstaining from worldly distractions and pleasures. [Jane Eberwein, email to the author, February 19, 2019.]