Eight

YOU WERE NOT AWARE THAT YOU SAVED MY LIFE

Tuesday, August 16, 1870 2 p.m. Thermometer 76 degrees, clouds 1 cumulous, Winds W 2, Therm Attached to Barometer 66.5, Dry Bulb 76.0, Wet Bulb 62,557.9. Humidity 43%, Remarks: Smoky.

—Ebenezer Snell, The Meteorological Journal Kept at Amherst College

Although Emily knew she should lessen the strain on her eyes by not reading, she simply could not help herself. After she arrived home from medical treatment in Boston, she grabbed the family’s volume of Shakespeare and looked for a place to hide. Her bedroom—private as it was—was too open to intrusion: too many raps on the door, too many calls from the kitchen to help chop chicken or bang spice for cakes. She wanted to be left alone and she wanted to raise her voice. Up on the second floor, she opened a door near the front of the house that hardly anyone ever used and climbed steep stairs to the attic. The attic was cavernous, running nearly the full expanse of the house and crowned with towering, roughhewn beams. On either side, two rounded windows cast faint pools of light. Another set of narrow steps led from the attic to the cupola, but Emily decided to stay put. She knew the views from the top were beautiful, but she needed more space than the small cupola offered. Less light too. She wanted to follow doctor’s orders and not endanger her eyes. The attic was perfect for her purpose. She opened her Shakespeare to 2 Henry VI and ripped through pages until she found the passage. “I thought I should tear the leaves out as I turned them,” she said.¹ She hungered for words after months of being forbidden to read or even use a pen. She wanted to experience their full force—out loud and dramatically proclaimed. It was no accident that she sought this austere place for her performance. The words—and nothing else—were all that mattered. Then she let loose. “‘Let me hear from thee,’ her voice rang out. ‘For whereso’er thou art in this world’s Globe / I’ll have an Iris that shall find thee out.’”² No one found her out, alone in the attic—a would-be Shakespearean actress performing for an audience of spiders and stumbling flies. That was just what she wanted.

Emily’s garret performances did not continue. Within weeks of coming home, Emily realized she would need to return to Boston for additional medical attention. Frustrated and impatient, Vinnie simply could not understand why Emily did not get well. In April 1865—only four months after she had returned from her initial treatments—Emily again was back in the boardinghouse, living with her cousins, and under the physician’s care. “The Doctor says it must heal while warm Weather lasts, or it will be more troublesome,” she wrote home.³ Emily longed for the kind of solitude she’d sought in the family attic, but she would not find it in the city, and certainly not during that tumultuous spring. At almost the very moment she arrived at the boardinghouse for a second time, word came of the Confederate surrender at Appomattox. The terrible war was over. Years of battle had devastated the country and left no one untouched, not even in bucolic Amherst. Seventy-five Amherst homes mourned loved ones who had been killed, wounded, captured, or were still missing.⁴ Celebrations of the war’s end were everywhere across Massachusetts. Parades marched up and down Cambridge streets, the Boston telegraph clattered so incessantly, newspapers could barely keep up, and Emily’s boardinghouse buzzed with elated conversation. But a week later, Abraham Lincoln was dead, murdered by a Confederate sympathizer. The shock of Lincoln’s assassination was so profound, people did not know what to say or do. For want of something more solemn than a nod, Cambridge men saluted one another. The day of Lincoln’s funeral, citizens gathered at City Hall around the corner from Emily’s boardinghouse. After somber speeches, people sat frozen in their seats, as if moving would unleash another nightmare. But it was the sound of the city that people remembered most. One person said Cambridge felt like “one mighty ocean of sound . . . rolling through space like a deep sob of anguish.”⁵ Emily must have found the city’s grief deafening, and it intensified her own worry. She was concerned about Sue, whose sister, Harriet Gilbert Cutler, had died unexpectedly, leaving a husband and young children. Of Sue’s three sisters, now only Mattie remained. “I would have drowned twice to save you sinking, dear,” she wrote. “If I could only have covered your Eyes so you would’nt have seen the Water.”⁶ Grief returned later that fall when Mattie’s two-year-old daughter died. Another “ice nest,” Emily wrote.⁷

In October 1865, Emily returned to Amherst, hopeful this time that Dr. Williams’s treatment had been successful. The next spring, still experiencing minor trouble, she considered going back for another round of care, but Edward Dickinson thought the crisis had passed. Deferring as she usually did to Edward’s wishes, she remained at home. Father “is in the habit of me,” she said.⁸ As far as anyone knew, Emily’s eye problems had been cured. Thankfully, blindness had been averted, although the family did purchase a copy of Dr. Williams’s new book on ophthalmic science, just in case another emergency occurred.⁹ Emily never again complained of complications and returned without comment to her usual activity—housework, cooking, reading, writing poems, and corresponding with Thomas Wentworth Higginson.

When Higginson realized Emily had been in Cambridge, he bombarded her with invitations to meet in Boston. Even though she was nearly forty, she again used her father as an excuse for staying home. “I must omit Boston,” she told him. Father “likes me to travel with him but objects that I visit.”¹⁰ But Emily did want to see Higginson and extended her own invitation to visit Amherst. The timing for him was not right, though. Higginson was worried about his wife’s health. Mary’s mobility had become so compromised and her muscles so stiff, she had to turn pages of a book with a wand.¹¹ Then there were concerns about money. Higginson was doing everything he could to generate income. At times it seemed like he was on and off trains every week, lecturing with Emerson, speaking to women’s clubs. The conflict he always felt between literature and activism remained: he should be doing more to ensure his soldiers received equal treatment under the law; he should work for woman’s suffrage. He wanted to be in the thick of political action and not like one of those writers disparaged for having their heads in the clouds: men Henry Adams called poorly dressed hypocrites who gazed out windows and proclaimed, “I am raining.”¹² Higginson should have taken his own advice. Years before he had written, “The more bent any man is upon action, the more profoundly he needs the calm lessons of Nature to preserve his equilibrium.”¹³ It was balance he needed, not a choice between action and writing. Literature kept him balanced and Emily Dickinson kept his mind on literature. The day was coming when he would finally meet his mysterious poet—a day they both would remember for the rest of their lives. From the moment he set foot on Emily’s doorstep that day, Higginson would write down as much as he could recall about what she said and how she said it. His memory would provide the most intimate account anyone ever recorded of what it felt like to sit across from Emily Dickinson. The two would have to wait until August 1870 before meeting each other. The wait would be worth it. In the meantime, they continued to write.

When another of her poems appeared in print in 1866, Emily was immediately in touch. She was worried Higginson might have seen the verse and doubted her vow to avoid publication. “A narrow fellow in the grass” appeared on the front page of the February 14 Springfield Republican and again in the weekend edition. Even though the poem was anonymous, she fretted about what Mr. Higginson might think and thought it best to explain. “Lest you meet my Snake and suppose I deceive it was robbed of me,” she wrote.¹⁴ Apparently Sue had shared the verse with Samuel Bowles, who in turn published it. But this time Emily was angry about its publication, especially because someone had changed her line breaks. She was “defeated,” she said, “of the third line by the punctuation” and complained, “the third and fourth [lines] were one.” The question mark at the end of line three especially disturbed her. Emily did not want so hard a stop, preferring lines three and four to glide together. The words should move continuously to the fifth line, she may have thought, mirroring the motion of the snake sliding from one patch of grass to the next.* She was not pleased her literary intention had been tampered with and added, “I had told you I did not print.” She folded a clipping of the poem into her letter as evidence of her complaint—or perhaps to lend proof that she had another poem published.¹⁵

THE SNAKE.

A narrow fellow in the grass

Occasionally rides;

You may have met him–did you not?

His notice instant is,

The grass divides as with a comb,

A spotted shaft is seen,

And then it closes at your feet,

And opens further on.

He likes a boggy acre,

A floor too cool for corn,

Yet when a boy and barefoot,

I more than once at noon

Have passed, I thought, a whip-lash,

Unbraiding in the sun,

When stooping to secure it,

It wrinkled and was gone.

Several of nature’s people

I know, and they know me;

I feel for them a transport

Of cordiality.

Yet never met this fellow,

Attended or alone,

Without a tighter breathing,

And zero at the bone.

If Samuel Bowles felt the wrath of Emily’s grievance over publication or the bungled lines, he did not mention it. His only comment on the poem was surprise that Emily knew the proper agricultural conditions for growing corn. “How did that girl ever know that a boggy field wasn’t good for corn?” he asked Sue.¹⁶ For Emily, the criticism over an intrusive editorial hand was her last word on the subject; it was the last time she voiced an objection to any editorial interference ever. Even when additional poems were published, she never articulated another criticism about line breaks, titles, or other changes to her manuscript text. Either she approved, disapproved and kept opinions to herself, or—as with so many other moments in her life—she simply remained silent.

With Emily home again in Amherst and Thomas Wentworth Higginson more confident his ailing wife was being well cared for in their Newport boardinghouse, the two correspondents renewed their conversation about a visit. Higginson went first and again invited Emily to Boston. He frequently made the short trip from Newport to Boston and thought the location would be a good halfway meeting point. But Emily declined, using Edward Dickinson as her old excuse. In place of Higginson’s suggestion, she extended her own, but they still could not find a time. A few years later, Higginson mentioned the prospect to a botanist friend who taught at Amherst College. “I have always dreamed of coming to Amherst, to see you,” he said, “& my unseen correspondent Emily Dickinson.”¹⁷ Yet, Higginson’s schedule again wouldn’t work, and instead he presented another meet-you-halfway invitation to Emily, this time adding Boston literary and social events as enticements. “You must come down to Boston sometimes?” he wrote. “All ladies do.” Would it be possible to lure you to meetings on the third Monday of each month at Mrs. Sargent’s, when somebody reads a paper and others discuss? Mr. Emerson will read next Monday, he said, and there is also a meeting of the Woman’s Club, where I’ll read a paper on the Greek goddesses. When it seemed he still did not have enough attractions to offer, Higginson threw in even more, adding he would be in Cambridge in June for his Harvard reunion, and later for a music festival. If that weren’t enough, he gave one more desperate push. “Don’t you need sea air in summer,” he asked.¹⁸ She did not. Nothing Higginson suggested could convince Emily to leave Amherst, but she wanted to see him. After corresponding for almost a decade with the man she now called her friend, she needed to tell him something important. “Could it please your convenience to come so far as Amherst I should be very glad,” she carefully wrote. “Of our greatest acts we are ignorant – You were not aware that you saved my Life.”¹⁹

Higginson decided to go. It was not Emily’s startling admission alone that prompted him, but also a tragic turn of events. On August 11, 1870, his older brother Stephen Higginson died of a stroke.²⁰ Perhaps “Wentworth,” as his family called him, could help make arrangements for burial. The very least he could do was to check on them and their home in Deerfield some twenty-five miles away from Amherst.† Sad as his duty was, Higginson realized there would never be a better time to visit Emily. He also wanted to visit his botanist friend, pay a call on Amherst College president William Stearns, and see chunks of meteors and dinosaur tracks in the college’s acclaimed museum. He planned to drop in on the sister of a new friend too—the young widow who recently had moved into the same Newport boardinghouse where he and his wife were living. In spite of her bereavement, Mrs. Helen Hunt was outgoing, good-natured, and full of energy. With his wife unable to join him in most outdoor activities, Higginson enjoyed taking his new friend on picnics and sailing. She was kind to his wife, too, decorating the boardinghouse parlor with flowers and organizing piano evenings she thought Mary might enjoy. One night, with Mary unable to make the steps, Higginson and his new friend climbed to the boardinghouse roof to take in a lunar eclipse. “She is in deep mourning,” Higginson wrote his sisters, but is also “bright & sociable & may prove an accession.”²¹

Helen was mourning not only the loss of her husband in the tragic naval yard accident but the death of their remaining son as well. Young Warren Horsford Hunt—“Rennie” to his family—died of diphtheria in 1865. He was nine years old. Helen once again traveled to West Point, this time to bury Rennie next to her husband and their firstborn child. At that moment, she realized—more than at any other time in her life—she was alone. Higginson suspected Mrs. Hunt’s sunny disposition masked deeper sorrows, and he was right. After Rennie died, Helen first thought she would never have the concentration to work. But when her sister urged Helen to take steps forward, she uncharacteristically snapped back. “I do not see why you urge me so to take myself in hand,” she wrote. “As if I had not done it!”²² What she meant by “done it” was to immerse herself in their parents’ prescription for any malady: hard work and cheerfulness. She also was writing. While Helen had always wanted to write, she had produced nothing. She needed to feel the full weight of her loss and isolation before she could re-create herself. “I myself never took an upward step, till I left happiness behind me,” she later said.²³ She began by publishing poems about grief. The next year she wrote book reviews and essays. She then turned her attention to travel writing and discovered she was good at describing places and people. Every year, when her seasonal allergies fired up, Helen escaped to Bethlehem, New Hampshire, where she wrote accounts of the charming town and the price it was paying for an influx of visitors. Once, after returning to her Newport boardinghouse from a research trip, Higginson and fellow boarders greeted her with a playful note applauding the “GREAT AMERICAN OVERLAND TRAVELER WOMAN!”²⁴ Helen also set out for Europe and wrote more essays from the continent. But it was her poetry that captured Higginson’s highest praise. He shared her work and called Mrs. Hunt “one of the most gifted poetesses in America.”²⁵ Even Ralph Waldo Emerson was paying attention. After meeting her in Newport, he said Mrs. Hunt’s work deserved recognition. He found it original, elegant, beautifully compressed, and even pasted a newspaper clipping of one of her poems in the front of his journal.²⁶ Helen grew to rely on advice from “the Colonel,” as she called Higginson. She was grateful for his suggestion to take herself more seriously, and asked him to wield his blue pencil over awkward phrases. “If you see a rent in any of the lines, you might perhaps patch it for me, dear Col. as you so often used to,” she wrote.²⁷ Now that Higginson was reading both Emily’s and Helen’s manuscripts, he wanted to make sure the old friends were aware of each other’s endeavors. They had much in common: both fiercely independent, both brilliant writers, both preferring to publish anonymously. Higginson knew Mrs. Hunt was preparing a small volume of poetry for publication—frantically churning out travel pieces to cover the cost of printing. Even her publisher thought she was crazy, working so hard for a book that probably wouldn’t earn a cent. But Mrs. Hunt’s ambition revealed her growing confidence. Self-possession was something else the two women shared. “There is always one thing to be grateful for,” Emily once said, “that one is one’s self & not somebody else.”²⁸ Higginson wondered if Emily might reconsider the question of publication. Perhaps his visit to Amherst could convince her to do what Mrs. Hunt—and all literary ladies did.

Mr. Higginson’s visit would be no ordinary call for Emily—not that she received many guests. Since her beloved dog, Carlo, had died, Emily seemed different.‡ Without her silent companion beside her, she stayed indoors and was more reclusive. The great literary productivity of the Civil War years had tapered off. She also stopped collecting her poems into stitched fascicles, and new poems remained unbound in loose sheets. There continued to be revisions to some of the eleven hundred poems she already had written—there would always be revisions—but urgency no longer propelled her. She had practical reasons for writing fewer poems. Losing the family’s maid, Margaret O’Brien, to marriage in 1865 placed more household demands on all the Dickinson women. When help could not be retained, Austin noted the strain. “No girl at the other house yet,” he had written Sue, who was away visiting relatives. “Consequence—depression.”²⁹ But later, Margaret Maher joined the Dickinson family as a housekeeper and cook. Although she wavered about staying at first, she became an invaluable presence, adding stability to the household and providing more time for Emily to write.³⁰ But other changes were evident besides the number of poems she was writing. She was more patient, less insistent, and more forgiving of perceived slights. Although others around her were busy with their own lives, she did not feel as forsaken as she once had. When Sue gave birth to a daughter—Martha, born in 1866—Emily did not pester her sister-in-law with notes seeking attention. She showed similar acceptance of Austin’s many town involvements. One night in the dark, she accompanied her brother across the street to admire the new First Church building, a construction project that had consumed Austin for years. Even Emily’s aging parents were absorbed in new callings that she noted with pleasure rather than rejection. Emily Norcross Dickinson delighted in her two grandchildren and Edward joined Col. William Clark working to start an agricultural college in Amherst.§ Emily’s sense of self made the difference. She knew who she was. Vinnie once observed that her sister’s primary job was to think. “She was the only one of us who had that to do,” she said.³¹ Emily no longer was hoping to make her family proud, as she once told Sue. The hundreds of poems in fascicles and sheets hidden away in her room bore witness to what she already had accomplished. One had only to look at her to see the maturity. Her russet hair, once the object of girlhood impulsiveness—first long, then cut short—had settled into permanence: parted in the middle and pulled back in a knot. Then there was her clothing. The fashionable fabrics she had once asked Austin to bring from Boston—the calicos, the colored cloth—had given way to dimity. She now wore one style—white dresses—all year round. They were loose-fitting, down to the ankles with lace trim, pearl buttons, and a pocket large enough for paper or a pencil. Words had shifted for her, too. When she was young, she said, words were cheap and weak: the exuberant valentines, the effusive letters to Abiah. But nothing had grown mightier to her now. Sometimes she would write a word and trace the outline of its curves with her finger. She said the word before her glowed.³² Emily had chosen deeper rather than more abundant sustenance, a life where—as she put it—she would eat evanescence slowly.³³ Thomas Wentworth Higginson also noticed a change. In her letters, she no longer signed her name on a card, slipped inside the envelope: a game played as much for effect as reticence. Largely gone, too, were the callow signatures of “Your Gnome” and “Your Scholar.” Now she signed her name with a single word: “Dickinson.” That is who she had become.

Colonel Higginson was excited and nervous about paying calls. As a boy he was shy around women outside his family. To mitigate awkwardness, he would write down conversation topics. If tongue-tied, he would pull the paper from his pocket and select a matter to discuss.³⁴ But Higginson had plenty of questions for Emily, chief among them inquiries about her seclusion. In a letter before his visit, he had asked if Carlo’s death had made her even more detached from society. It was difficult for him to understand how she could live so isolated. He certainly was awestruck by the extraordinary images that flooded her mind, but wondered if she paid a price for brilliance. It “isolates one anywhere to think beyond a certain point or have such luminous flashes as come to you,” he said.³⁵ At times her talent made him reluctant to answer her letters, aware he never could match her artfulness. He was clumsy with words, he told her, and often missed the fine edge of her thought. But he forced himself to put aside timidity and continued to write, knowing what he could not offer in useful criticism he might be able to offer in dependability, friendship, and generosity. Higginson thought she needed someone—a person who admired her, even if he did not always understand what she was saying. “Sometimes I take out your letters & verses, dear friend,” he wrote, “and when I feel their strange power, it is not strange that I find it hard to write & that long month pass. I have the greatest desire to see you, always feeling that perhaps if I could once take you by the hand I might be something to you; but till then you only enshroud yourself in this fiery mist & I cannot reach you, but only rejoice in the rare sparkles of light.”³⁶

Eight years had passed since Emily had first asked Higginson if her verse were alive. That was a long time to wait before meeting each other face-to-face. The night before he was to arrive in Amherst, Emily dreamed all night—not of Higginson—but of his wife, Mary, a woman the poet had only heard of infrequently. Mary Higginson’s spectral appearance puzzled Emily and she was eager to share the dream. But she would have to wait twenty-four hours before telling Mr. Higginson. All day Monday, August 15, 1870, Emily expected him to arrive, but he did not. There had been a mix-up. He thought they had agreed on Tuesday, not Monday. The next day when they both realized the error, Emily sent a kindly note up-street to his Amherst House hotel. “Dear friend,” she wrote, “I will be at Home and glad. I think you said the 15th. The incredible never surprises us because it is incredible.”³⁷ With the day straightened out, Higginson prepared to meet her. To be honest, he was exhausted. He had spent the past year writing two books. The Atlantic Monthly serialized his first novel, Malbone; An Oldport Romance, and then there was an upcoming book based on his Civil War diary. Living in Newport had also lost its allure. He now found society life superficial and draining.³⁸ Perhaps Emily knew better after all how to preserve the energy needed for creativity. As tired as he was, Higginson must have wished he could find a place to exercise in Amherst. If he were home, he would chop wood or swing on parallel bars at the Newport gymnasium. Exercise always invigorated him, he realized, and warded off feeling glum.³⁹ But Higginson found no parallel bars in Amherst and so he made himself comfortable. The hotel Emily had suggested was convenient: four stories tall in the center of town with a dining room and livery stable around the corner. It was not as hot as it had been that summer, but it was dry. Many town wells had dried up, and the Connecticut River was low with brown banks stretching from shore. The town common looked terrible—scraggly and barren. It’s “higglety-pigglety,” one embarrassed citizen said, “with patches of grass, gravel pits . . . old frog holes and snakes.”⁴⁰ Near the common, a few workers were pouring tar. Amherst was putting in sidewalks, and one would run directly in front of Austin and Edward’s law office.⁴¹ The sounds Higginson usually heard—the clatter of Boston omnibuses, ships coming into dock at Newport’s Narragansett Bay—were nowhere to be found. An unspeakably quiet town, he thought.

Calling card in hard, Higginson set out walking toward the Homestead in long, loping strides. Outside the hotel, new farm machinery was on display. Men listened to a salesman touting a thresher’s efficiency: with a boy to turn and a man to feed, it could produce 100 bushels of oats a day.⁴² Across the street, the Amherst Record newspaper office posted its current edition: a “peotry” column featured a verse by Bret Harte and there was a lengthy article on growing corn. The best way to cultivate corn in New England, an expert reported, was to plow in the autumn and spread green manure in the spring. It was all about chemistry.⁴³ A few steps further on, at Frank Wood’s Dining Rooms waiters served stewed oysters, a favorite of the local citizenry. Higginson passed a Chinese laundry, a harness shop, and Mr. Marsh’s cabinet- and coffin-making establishment. A dry-goods store was draped in mourning. One of the store’s proprietors, William Cutler, had died suddenly the same day as Higginson’s brother. He didn’t make the connection, of course, that Cutler was Susan Dickinson’s brother-in-law—the man who feared she might die if she left Amherst to teach in Baltimore. Higginson followed the road down a gentle slope until it leveled off near a copse of trees and the start of a wooden fence. The fence marked the beginning of the Dickinson property. First the Evergreens, Susan and Austin’s stately home, then the Homestead, Edward Dickinson’s manse. The walkway rose again as it approached the front steps—a not-so-inconsequential reminder of the family’s prominence. Higginson took in the sight so he could tell Mary everything. A large house. Like a country lawyer’s. Brick. Flower and vegetable gardens to the east and an apple orchard. Pears too.⁴⁴ From where he stood, he could see the train depot and the distant line of the Pelham hills. Mrs. Hunt used to laugh at how timidly Colonel Higginson would knock at her room in the boarding house. He knocks like a baby, she said, and then slides in edgewise.⁴⁵ Higginson made no such hesitant entrance at the Dickinsons. He knocked, presented his card, and was ushered into a dark parlor on the left. Then he waited.

First he heard her. From upstairs on the second floor came the sound of quick, light steps—footsteps that sounded like a child’s. Then she entered. A plain woman with two bands of reddish hair, not particularly good-looking, wearing a white pique dress. The white stunned him. It was exquisite. A blue worsted shawl covered her shoulders. She seemed fearful to him, breathless at first, and extended her hand, not to shake—but to offer something. “These are my introduction,” she said, handing him two day-lilies. “Forgive me if I am frightened; I never see strangers & hardly know what I say.”⁴⁶ Then Emily looked at him. A tall man in his mid-forties with joyful face, she thought.⁴⁷ Dark-haired, whiskered, graceful, he looked kind. Higginson did not reach into his pocket to fish out a topic for conversation. He did not need to. Once they sat, Emily began talking and she did not stop. “When I lost the use of my Eyes,” she told him “it was a comfort to me to think there were so few real books that I could easily find some one to read me all of them.”⁴⁸ She wondered how people got through their days without thinking. “How do most people live without any thoughts,” she said. “There are many people in the world (you must have noticed them in the street) How do they live. How do they get strength to put on their clothes in the morning.” She was full of aphorisms, sentences that seemed to have been crafted earlier in her mind and that she wanted to share. “Women talk: men are silent: that is why I dread women; Truth is such a rare thing it is delightful to tell it; Is it oblivion or absorption when things pass from our minds?” At times Emily seemed self-conscious and asked Higginson to jump in. But every time he tried, she was off again, and words tumbled out, almost uncontrollably. He tried to recall every phrase, every thought, even her tone, humor, and asides. “My father only reads on Sunday – he reads lonely & rigorous books,” she said. Once, she recalled, her brother brought home a novel that they knew their father would not condone. Austin hid it under the piano cover for Emily to find. When she was young, she said, and read her first real book, she was in ecstasy. “This then is a book!” she had exclaimed. “And are there more of them!” She boasted about her cooking and said she made all the bread for the family. Puddings, too. “People must have puddings,” she said. The way she said “puddings”—so dreamy and abstracted—sounded to Higginson as though she were talking about comets. Emily said her life had not been constrained or dreary in any way. “I find ecstasy in living,” she explained. The “mere sense of living is joy enough.” When at last the opportunity arose, Higginson posed the question he most wanted to ask: Did you ever want a job, have a desire to travel or see people. The question unleashed a forceful reply. “I never thought of conceiving that I could ever have the slightest approach to such a want in all future time.” Then she loaded on more. “I feel I have not expressed myself strongly enough.” Emily reserved her most striking statement for what poetry meant to her, or rather how it made her feel. “If I read a book [and] it makes my whole body so cold no fire ever can warm me I know that is poetry,” she said. “If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry. These are the only way I know it. Is there any other way.” Emily was remarkable. Brilliant. Candid. Deliberate. Mystifying. After years of waiting, he was finally sitting across from Emily Dickinson of Amherst, and all he wanted to do was listen.

Following goodbyes, Higginson walked down the granite steps and headed toward town. He needed to clear his head and let settle what had just happened. Perhaps he could drop by President Stearns’s office over at the college, he thought, or look up Mrs. Hunt’s sister. Maybe stare at fossils. When he reached the college, the natural history museum was closed, so he made his way to Mrs. Banfield’s home. He found Helen Hunt’s sister engaging and lively; the two women even looked alike. Higginson and Ann Banfield wished that Helen could have joined them, but she was in New Hampshire working—she was always working. With only months left before her book of poems would go to press, Helen was writing essays nonstop in order to pay for the poetry collection’s printing. “I am working away at my trade,” she had written her sister, “send off $45 worth of Ms. tomorrow. . . . I must earn every cent I spend till Jan.”⁴⁹ Higginson returned to the college after his social call and met with President Stearns. William Stearns knew Emily, of course, and mentioned how proud Vinnie was of her sister. Everyone knew the Dickinsons were proud people, but Vinnie—Stearns emphasized—was especially loyal to her older sister. Stearns noted he would be on the same train as Higginson the next morning. They could talk more then about the Dickinsons.

Before returning to the hotel for the night, Higginson called once more on Emily. On the parlor table, he caught a glimpse of his nature book, Out-Door Papers, as well as his new novel. Emily had read everything he had ever written, even if she was not subtle about acknowledging it. She must have felt more relaxed than earlier in the day, and entered the parlor informally. Her mind was still on her family and she still wanted to talk. “I never had a mother,” she said. “I suppose a mother is one to whom you hurry when you are troubled.” She spoke of her father, too, and shared a story Higginson could hardly believe, a tale about not knowing how to tell time. “I never knew how to tell time by the clock till I was 15,” she said. “My father thought he had taught me but I did not understand & I was afraid to say I did not & afraid to ask any one else lest he should know.” They talked of Helen Hunt and Emily recalled the afternoon that Helen and her husband sat at her tea table and Major Hunt fed Carlo scraps from the table. She thought Mr. Hunt was the most interesting man she had ever met. It struck Higginson that the time he spent with Emily that day had been an act of self-definition for her: her torrent of words was like a personal and literary manifesto. She reminded him of Bronson Alcott, Louisa May’s father—although Emily was not pompous or overbearing. Higginson hoped he could remember everything. Before he rose to leave, Emily placed a photograph in his hand. It was an image of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s grave, a memento Josiah Holland had brought back from Europe and presented to her a few days before. He accepted the gift reluctantly, knowing it probably meant more to her than it would to him. Like the daylilies from earlier, he knew the photograph was Emily’s way of saying thank you. “Gratitude is the only secret that cannot reveal itself,” she told him. Higginson said he hoped to see her again sometime, and she abruptly interrupted him. “Say in a long time,” she corrected, “that will be nearer. Some time is nothing.” With a hundred thoughts whirling in his head, Higginson retraced his steps back to the hotel, past the Chinese laundry and the oysters and the livery stables. He needed to go to bed. But before turning in, he compiled notes, trying to recall it all. He pulled out another sheet and wrote a letter to his wife. “I shan’t sit up tonight to write you all about E.D. dearest but if you had read Mrs. Stoddard’s novels you could understand a house where each member runs his or her own selves.¶ Yet I only saw her.”⁵⁰ Miss Dickinson said many things, he told her, some remarks you would have found foolish and some I thought wise, he wrote. Higginson made one final note before retiring, a quick entry in his diary. Meeting Emily Dickinson quite equaled my expectation, he wrote.⁵¹ It had been a momentous day: one he would never forget. As he turned down the lamp, he hoped he would be able to calm his mind and get to sleep. He wanted to wake up early and see the fossils.

Most people in Amherst were unaware of Thomas Wentworth Higginson’s visit with Emily Dickinson. They had been preoccupied with the excitement at Mr. and Mrs. Gray’s house. Roxalina Gray had a way with plants—and the week before, her rare night-blooming cereus unfolded just as evening fell and then closed forever right before dawn. Mrs. Gray opened her doors the night the flower bloomed and neighbors filed in to witness the phenomenon. The petals were enormous—as big as dinner plates—and smelled like honey.⁵² For Emily, Mr. Higginson’s visit had been just as miraculous. It felt unreal to her as if a phantom had entered the family parlor and transformed it. “Contained in this short Life / Are magical extents,” she wrote.⁵³ Emily felt elated, emboldened, and slightly off-kilter. Hearing herself talk so much, she said, made her feel as though the words rushing out were not sentences at all, but events.⁵⁴ After the call, Emily reached again for the family Shakespeare and turned to Macbeth. “Now a wood / Comes toward Dunsinane,” she read, reliving how mystical her friend’s visit had been.⁵⁵ Yet as exhilarated as she felt, it was gratitude that lingered. When she thought about all Higginson had done for her—answering that first letter, writing her from the battlefront when he was wounded, continuing to write even when he felt his life had lost its purpose, urging her to take time to perfect her art—she felt nearly speechless. Higginson’s generosity “disables my Lips,” she said and magic, “as it electrifies, also makes decrepit.”⁵⁶ It was not only that he had read her poems—although she was thankful for that. It was that he had been constant. When she sought words to thank him, she reached not for metaphors from nature or images of planets and dreams that she had been working with. She went deeper. She chose anatomy. “The Vein cannot thank the Artery,” she told him, “but her solemn indebtedness to him, even the stolidest admit.”⁵⁷ That’s what Emily meant by saying Higginson had saved her life: her connection to him was vital and sustaining. Emily gave poetry to herself, but Higginson had affirmed her choice, and that to her was salvation. Over the next months, the thought of seeing him again played on her mind with eerie repetition. It “opens and shuts,” she said “like the eye of the Wax Doll.”⁵⁸ She hoped he would return to Amherst someday or in “a long time”—perhaps that would be nearer.

Before leaving town, Higginson took in the fossils. The dinosaur footprints looked like the scratches of ancient birds, he thought, or a bit like Emily Dickinson’s handwriting. On the train he sat for a while with President Stearns and they talked more about Emily and her family. It was an all-day ride through Vermont and into New Hampshire and Higginson could not stop thinking about Dickinson. He kept recalling her remark about puddings, her light step, and the imposing weight of her ancestral home. Higginson wrote additional notes and placed them in his valise for safekeeping. While he always tried to record his thoughts, he was especially concerned about capturing every particular about meeting the poet—“his” poet. It was as if he had some momentary glimpse into the future and could imagine generations of readers who wanted to know more. He wrote his wife again and told her about running into Edward Dickinson before leaving town. “Thin dry, & speechless,” he said, adding, “I saw what her life has been.”⁵⁹ Jostling along on the tracks, miles from Amherst, he said Emily Dickinson had dazzled him, but had also made him uncomfortable. She was not capable of casual conversation, he told Mary, or of everyday friendship. It took every ounce of his being to meet her level of intellectual intensity. “I never was with any one who drained my nerve power so much,” he admitted. “Without touching her, she drew from me. I am glad not to live near her.”⁶⁰

When Higginson’s train crossed into Vermont, he stared out the window and could barely see the Connecticut River. Rocks and sandbars emerged where there once was rushing current. There had been little rain. Every moment of his life Thomas Wentworth Higginson had studied the natural world. Rivers, hills, and pastures were a source of inspiration, a canvas on which to project his thoughts and search for answers. “Nature’ is what We know - / But have no Art to say,” Emily once wrote.⁶¹ Passing through Brattleboro, he surveyed the fields. They were as brown as those in Amherst. Grapes had begun to shrivel and farmers were already feeding hay to their cows. In a sign of early autumn, yellow leaves fell to the ground. Yet as dry as everything was, fruit was in abundance.⁶² It seemed a wonder. Recently Emily had bitten into a pear that had “hips like hams, and the flesh of bonbons,” she said.⁶³ Years earlier when he’d been a young man, Higginson had spent time at Brook Farm near Boston. That great experiment in communal living had intrigued him, and he had made several trips to examine the dairy and farming operations. Before he became a writer, he had considered becoming a farmer. Growing peaches interested him.⁶⁴ He liked the idea of being closely connected to the seasons and imagined planting a tree, watching it grow, picking its fruit, and transforming slices into pies and thick preserves. Down in Amherst, an editor prepared his copy for next week’s edition of the newspaper. This season there will be a good crop of apples, he wrote.⁶⁵ The New England Seven—as they were called—had names that were poetry themselves: Baldwins, Delicious, Wealthies, Gravensteins, Rhode Island Greenings, Northern Spies, Macintosh.⁶⁶ Higginson never got around to asking Emily if she was interested in preparing a book of poetry like Helen Hunt was doing. Perhaps he couldn’t find the nerve, feeling that if he pressed too hard, Emily would withdraw, vanishing like those sparkles of light he always associated with her. But the man who never became a peach farmer knew there was a time to sow and a time to reap. For Emily Dickinson, the harvest was yet to come.

* The question mark the Republican inserted in line 3 stayed on Emily’s mind for years. Ralph Franklin notes that in 1872, Dickinson sent another version of the poem to Sue and placed a question mark in the middle of line three: “You may have met him? Did you not/ His notice instant is – ” [R. W. Franklin, ed., The Poems of Emily Dickinson Variorum Edition. (Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1998), 954.] Franklin states that Dickinson probably sent Higginson a copy of the poem in 1865 before it appeared in the newspaper, hence her anxiety about him seeing the verse in print. [Variorum Edition, 952.] The poet continued to rework “A narrow fellow in the grass” over several years—changing lowercase letters to capitals, inserting alternate words, taking out punctuation and putting it in again—demonstrating her lifelong commitment to revision.

† Stephen Higginson II was a merchant in business with his older brother George. In 1853, he purchased a home on Main Street in Deerfield, where the family spent most of their time. According to the 1870 census, Stephen Higginson died in Deerfield, but Thomas Wentworth Higginson’s diary lists his brother’s death as occurring in Boston. Stephen Higginson II was buried at Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge, Massachusetts. [Margaret Dakin, email to the author, August 7, 2017; Cynthia Harbeson, email to the author, August 8, 2017; Thomas Wentworth Higginson’s 1870 diary, Houghton Library, Harvard University.]

‡ Carlo died around January 1866 at approximately age seventeen. Dickinson never had another dog. One is reminded of the words Dickinson wrote about Carlo in her 1850 valentine published in the Amherst College Indicator: “His mistress’s rights he doth defend – although it bring him to his end.” [L34.] Habegger notes Carlo’s death marked the “end of something” for Dickinson. [Alfred Hebegger, My Wars Are Laid Away in Books: The Life of Emily Dickinson (New York: Random House, 2001), 497.]

§ Edward Dickinson was one of the founders of Massachusetts Agricultural College, now the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. The college was chartered in 1863 and offered its first classes in 1867.

¶ Elizabeth Drew Stoddard (1823–1902) is best known for her novel The Morgesons (1862), which features a female protagonist struggling between societal norms and her own desire for independence.