Nine

SUCCESS IS COUNTED SWEETEST

Tuesday, October 10, 1876 2 p.m. Temperature 63.4 degrees. Clouds 2 str. Wind SW 3. Barometer 29.431. Humidity 51 Remarks none.

—Sabra Snell, The Meteorological Journal Kept at Amherst College

Helen Hunt’s first mistake was asking Emily Dickinson for travel advice. Her second was taking it. After Thomas Wentworth Higginson urged the two childhood friends to reconnect, Helen made plans to see Emily again. She stopped by Amherst in August 1873 on her way to New Hampshire, where her sister now lived. After so much travel across the country and in Europe, Helen had taken to viewing her hometown as a backwater. She still had affection for the landscape and memories of her girlhood, but she also was quick to find fault. People didn’t dress well. The streets were dusty. Old-timers told the same tiresome stories. And certain preachers bellowed their way through sermons just as they always had. When she checked into the local boardinghouse Emily had recommended, she was not in the best mood. The room was awful: damp and stifling. A recent bout of diphtheria complicated matters and made Helen’s persistent problems with her lungs flare up again. She worried things would get worse, and blamed her health—blamed everything—on Amherst. There “was a positive miasm about the house,” she complained to her sister. “I was prostrated in twelve hours! . . . Me! Of all people! If there had not been a remarkably intelligent & skilled homeopathic Dr. there, I think I should never have got away alive! . . . [He] checked the dysentery—& orders me to fly at once.”¹ Helen obeyed the doctor’s orders and made her way to Worcester, securing lodgings where she previously had boarded. Even though she had to share the room with a young woman who had been in bed for five days with cholera, she found the conditions an improvement. In retrospect, consulting a woman as reclusive as Emily Dickinson for travel advice was misguided at best. And as for her new roommate’s cholera, Helen had her suspicions. “Brought from Amherst no doubt,” she huffed.² Helen’s visit with Emily would have to be postponed, but she would not abandon plans to see her. Helen never gave up. It was one of her best and—some would say—worst qualities. For decades, the two old friends had tried to find the right time to meet and talk about literature. Helen already had an agenda in mind: she believed Emily should publish and share her work with the world. While other writers and editors agreed that the poet’s verse should see the light of day, no one—including Thomas Wentworth Higginson—ever dared to speak so forcefully to Dickinson. But Helen was not like other people. She was passionate, pragmatic, persuasive, and impossible to turn away. Dickinson and Helen Hunt would find their moment to talk soon and—when it came—their conversation would have consequences for generations to come.

From time to time, other girlhood friends wanted to visit Emily, but she demurred. The letters she once sent friends all but begging them to visit had tailed off. Nearly all her schoolmates had married, were raising children, or had moved, and she felt little in common with them. Abby Wood from Emily’s Amherst Academy days had come to visit recently, and was startled to discover Emily had become the town enigma: darting upstairs when a visitor knocked or fleeing the garden when a carriage drove up. “Quick as a trout,” someone said.³ Children especially had stories about the secluded Miss Emily. One boy remembered stumbling upon her when he cut through the Dickinson property in search of playmates. There she was, standing on a rug near the barn, potting plants. The boy almost froze. But Emily motioned for him to join her and soon they were talking about favorite flowers. Before he dashed off, Emily snipped blossoms and handed them to the boy for his mother. He raced home, clutching the bouquet as if it were golden treasure.⁴ But Abby Wood thought surely that she would not have to rely on cutting through the Dickinson property to see her friend again. After all, she had traveled so far. Since marrying Rev. Daniel Bliss two decades ago, Abby and her husband had settled in Beirut, where they were rearing four children, and where Reverend Bliss had founded the Syrian Protestant College.* Over the years, Abby had sent Emily plant specimens from the Mediterranean and when Austin’s First Church building project was near completion, the Blisses had shipped cedarwood from the Holy Land for the new pulpit.⁵ Yet even with the kindness Abby had shown her, Emily offered her usual response to a request for a visit: she said no. Abby was astonished, and tried persuading Emily with some good-natured teasing. The second attempt worked, and Emily invited Abby in. Other friends, such as Samuel Bowles, received similar rejection. Once when he’d stopped by, Emily refused to leave her upstairs chamber. He stood at the bottom of the stairs and bellowed for her to come down. He even swore—mildly—calling her a “damned rascal.” She relented finally. Later in a note, she thanked Bowles for the visit and signed the letter, “Your Rascal,” playfully adding, “I washed the Adjective.”† The family had a name for Emily’s refusals and darting out of a room. “Elfing it,” they said.⁶ There was no question she delighted in occasional mischief, but Emily was serious about her privacy and required it to accomplish her work. She had articulated her point of view in a poem years earlier.

The Soul selects her own Society –

Then – shuts the Door –

To her divine Majority –

Present no more – ⁷

Thomas Wentworth Higginson was a person Emily never refused. On a winter day in 1873, he paid a second call at the Homestead. His schedule was tight, his visit brief, and he took few notes. But he wrote his sisters the little he could remember. Emily only sees a few others, he told them, and never goes outside her father’s ground. This time she had greeted him with a pale pink flower from her conservatory—a Daphne odora—and once more she dressed in white. Higginson promised his sisters the next time they came to Newport, he would read some of Dickinson’s verse. He had long ago given up critiquing her poems, and the letters between the two had taken on a different tone. Now when they wrote, they shared personal news. We come together as old and tired friends, Higginson told her. “I hope you will not cease to trust me and turn to me; and I will try to speak the truth to you, and with love.”⁸ Earlier she remembered the season of his first visit. It was “Mighty Summer,” she wrote. “Now the Grass is Glass and the Meadow Stucco.”⁹ Perhaps some instinct had put her in a somber mood and she hinted that she thought the second visit could be their last.

The thought of visiting Emily had grown stronger for Helen Hunt. From the many poems Colonel Higginson had been sharing, Helen had created a volume of her friend’s verse. She wanted to talk about Dickinson’s poems, especially the confounding ones, and she wanted to discuss a writer’s responsibility to the world. Once another writer had tried to tell Emily what she owed society and received a stinging reply. A “Miss P” had written, asking for poems to support a worthy cause.‡ Emily declined the request and burned the letter. It did not seem to bother her that Miss P might be offended. She’s probably off “extricating humanity from some hopeless ditch,” Emily scoffed.¹⁰ But Helen was undeterred by Emily’s resistance, and, she had another reason for wanting to speak with her. When it came to poetry, Helen now spoke from experience. The volume of verses she had worked so hard to write and pay for had met with critical acclaim—and rightly so. The book, published under her pen name “H. H.” was so popular that publishers issued an expanded edition almost immediately. Verses, one critic said, places “H. H.” not only above all American poetesses, but all English poetesses as well. Only Elizabeth Barrett Browning shows a greater range of imagination, he added. Other reviewers compared her intellect to Hawthorne, her lyricism to Wordsworth, and her nature poetry to Andrew Marvell and Emerson. With her travel essays, the short stories she was writing and now a book of poetry, Helen Hunt had become a respected and celebrated American writer. Higginson was thrilled and eager to hear what Emily thought of Helen’s verse. Dickinson said she liked the poems immensely and pronounced them stronger than any women’s poetry since Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Mrs. Lewes.§ “Truth like Ancestor’s Brocades,” she said, “can stand alone.”¹¹ Around the time Helen’s verse was published, another girlhood friend produced a volume of poetry. Emily Fowler Ford—Noah Webster’s granddaughter, who helped edit the Amherst Academy student publication, Forest Leaves—had been publishing for years in newspapers and the Atlantic. But the reviews for Mrs. Ford’s book did not equal those for Mrs. Hunt’s. The Springfield Republican observed Emily Ford writes too many poems, and “damages the effect of what she has said by what she keeps on saying.”^¶12 Regardless of the local opinion of Mrs. Ford, Higginson marveled at the three women writers who were born and raised in Amherst, Massachusetts: Helen Fiske Hunt, Emily Fowler Ford, and Emily Dickinson. What was it, he wondered, about that small college town that had produced so many literary women? “Amherst must be a nest of poetesses,” he told a friend.¹³

But it was Emily Dickinson who had the most important poems to offer, Helen believed. She did not belittle her own work, but—when it came to poetry—Hunt recognized Dickinson’s verse was of a wholly different order. Not only did she want to talk with Emily about literature in general, but she also wanted to talk about publishing. Unlike Higginson, who no longer broached certain subjects, or Abby Wood, who approached her old friend with gentle nudging, or even Samuel Bowles who playfully cursed, Helen simply barreled in. She wanted a serious, face-to-face conversation. But another one of Helen’s wanderings delayed the visit even longer. The attack of diphtheria that had shortened Helen’s visit to Amherst had also canceled a long-awaited journey to Colorado. She had wanted to see the Rocky Mountains in 1873 with May Alcott, Louisa’s sister—but May could not go.¹⁴ She then persuaded a Boston friend, but the two women had to turn back when Helen became ill. That’s when she had ended up in the damp Amherst boardinghouse. But now that she was feeling better, Helen wanted to set out again for Colorado. She had heard the mountains offered the perfect climate for people with respiratory disease. Not taking any chances on a second attempt across the plains, she convinced the Amherst homeopathic doctor to accompany her, along with a nurse. Once they’d reached Colorado’s eastern slope, Helen’s first sight of the mountains was dispiriting. “There stretched before me, to the east, a bleak, bare, unrelieved, desolate plain. There rose behind me, to the west, a dark range of mountains, snow-topped, rocky-walled, stern, cruel, relentless.” It was not what she’d hoped for. “One might die of such a place alone,” she wrote.¹⁵ Yet as she always did, Helen made the best of it. The doctor and nurse returned to Massachusetts, and Helen found a room in a Colorado Springs boardinghouse on a street known locally as Dead Man’s Row. Helen appreciated the dark humor; she was not the only person with lung problems who had moved to Colorado. Besides, she kept herself busy: writing more short stories, getting into a fight with William Dean Howells over grammar, and fuming over a review in the Nation that declared her poems lacked womanly grace. In 1872, Roberts Brothers of Boston—a new publisher for her—released Helen’s book of essays, Bits of Talk about Home Matters, an ironic title, considering Helen had never owned a home. Over time Colorado had become more appealing to her. “Mrs. Helen Hunt’s health is greatly improved by the ‘marvelous sunshine’ of Colorado Springs,” the Springfield Republican reported. “She says ‘it is enough, almost, to raise the dead.’”¹⁶ As much as she was growing to love the west, Helen still thought about a trip back east—and Emily Dickinson. But that was before Samuel Bowles introduced her to William Sharpless Jackson, a Colorado banker and executive with the Denver and Rio Grande Railroad. At first Mr. Jackson did not seem the kind of man Helen would find engaging. He was literal-minded, devoted to his financial books, and not prone to the kind of enthusiasm Helen always displayed. But he was taken with her independence and vitality, and she found his stability a comfort. Helen called him Will and, for some inexplicable reason, he called her Peggy. They spent nearly every Sunday outdoors in the mountains, and once when Helen wanted a perfect view of the sun coming up over Pikes Peak, the two camped on the floor in an empty Manitou Springs tollbooth, waiting for sunrise.¹⁷

It was just as well that Helen Hunt did not return to Amherst anytime soon. Emily had other concerns, and was especially worried about her father. As early as 1871, Edward had begun having health problems. When an unspecified illness made him take to his bed, Emily feared he would die. “Now in a piercing place,” she had written Fanny and Loo Norcross.¹⁸ Her father’s strong sense of duty and determination to erase the failures of his own father had exacted a price. College officials hailed Edward as perfectly “perpendicular,” but that was the problem.¹⁹ He never played, Emily said, and seldom gave in to an easy moment. One of his rare displays of exuberance was the purple ink he used to write letters home. But the letters themselves were filled with the driest of details and often trailed off with empty phrases, such as “nothing new,” “no more to say,” or “I can think of nothing particular.”²⁰ Even the “straightest engine has its leaning hour,” Emily wrote her cousins.²¹ Edward eventually recovered from that illness, and when the Panic of 1873 threw most of the nation’s railroads into receivership, he once again ran for political office. Railroads were everything to him. Arguably the proudest moment of his life came when the Amherst, Belchertown Palmer Line named a locomotive after him: the Edward Dickinson.²² Against every vow he’d made about leaving politics forever, he placed his name on the ballot in 1873 for the Massachusetts House of Representatives. He won—and the next year, the seventy-one-year-old legislator trudged between Amherst and Boston as a freshman representative. His absence was hard on the family. Austin and Sue’s adolescent son, Ned, recently had an attack of inflammatory rheumatism and worried the family. As much as Edward was concerned about his grandson, he was also committed to using his political clout to complete the Hoosac Tunnel, linking rail service between Boston and Albany. The project had been mired in problems for years: financial debacles, engineering mistakes, and blasting disasters.# During a legislative recess, Edward had made a trip home and—before leaving Boston—he’d stopped at a bookstore to select two volumes he thought Emily might enjoy: a biography of Theodore Parker and new book of poems by Mrs. Lewes. But even while home, he worked demanding hours in his Amherst law office. A local judge noticed the light burning in Edward’s legal chambers long after most residents had retired for the night.²³ On June 16, 1874, Representative Dickinson was back in Boston, and rose to make a speech on the statehouse floor on behalf of the railroad. It had been a miserably hot day with lowering thunder-clouds.²⁴ As he spoke, Edward felt faint and sat down. Alarmed, a colleague asked if he could walk the stricken Mr. Dickinson back to his hotel on Tremont Street. Edward said yes. He knew something was wrong and wanted to return to Amherst immediately.²⁵ That evening Emily was eating supper with her mother and Vinnie when Austin burst through the Homestead door, a telegram in his hand. She instantly knew by the look on his face that something terrible had happened. Father is ill, her brother said, and he and Vinnie must go to Boston at once. Everyone jumped and rushed to retrieve valises and hats. It was six o’clock. The train had already gone through. Vinnie and Austin would have to take the carriage. From the barn came the clatter of harnesses and straps as a stablehand dressed the horses. Then another dispatch arrived. It was too late. Edward Dickinson was dead.** ²⁶

It seemed fitting that a locomotive should bring Edward Dickinson’s body home. An undertaker met the train at the depot and escorted the coffin up the hill to the Homestead. When he finished his work and left the house, Austin stared down at his father’s face as if for the first time. Then he leaned over and kissed him. “There, father, I never dared do that while you were living,” he said.²⁷ Over the next three days, the town of Amherst came to a standstill. First Church canceled its strawberry festival, the college suspended classes, and out of respect for Amherst’s leading citizen, the bank, the marble works, and even tonsorial artist James A. Williams closed their doors. The only businesses still busy were the hotel and the livery stables: so many lawmakers, judges, mayors, and college trustees had arrived for the funeral, extra hands were needed. On July 19, 1874, workers carried College Hall settees over to the Homestead for crowds gathering on the lawn. Not everyone could fit into the Dickinsons’ parlors or library. Vinnie was everywhere, consoling friends, tending to details of the service, and making sure neighbors had a place to sit. Her strength did not escape Austin’s notice; he’d marveled at his sister’s composure, and his mother’s too. Austin, however, was another matter. His sorrow was so overwhelming it blurred his thinking. He could not remember to whom he had talked or what anyone said. His grief frightened his seven-year-old daughter, Mattie, who tried to do whatever she could to make things better. She scurried around the house setting out vases of lilacs and daisies. Although no one had seen Emily, Mattie knew where she was. Aunt Emily was upstairs alone in her chamber with the door opened a crack. She had caught her niece’s attention and whispered a caution in her ear: don’t cut all the blossoms from the garden, she told her.²⁸ Emily never came downstairs. The only friend she spoke to that day was Samuel Bowles. Perhaps she knew he would never leave without seeing her. After a brief service in the family library, a line of eighteen pallbearers carried Edward’s coffin through the back fields behind the Homestead to the cemetery. Emily stayed behind in her room as the coffin was lowered into the ground next to the graves of Edward’s mother and father. Later someone said Edward Dickinson’s death reversed all the laws of nature for his eldest daughter. “I thought I was strongly built,” Emily wrote weeks later, “but this stronger has undermined me.”²⁹ She did not visit her father’s grave the day he was buried. She did not visit his grave the rest of her life.³⁰

In one of the last letters Edward wrote home, he had been worrying about pears. It seemed such a mundane concern: were the pear trees in the family orchard producing the best fruit? But Edward had the future on his mind. He wanted to clear away dead limbs and splice new shoots onto the trees so they would bear fruit for years and years to come.³¹ What he needed, he had thought, was a graft to produce descendants—a single worthy scion. Emily kept thinking of the sound of her father’s voice. There was the militant way he thundered out morning prayers, in a voice that startled her: “‘I say unto you!’”³² But she also recalled a voice that came in fugitive moments, she said, when he forgot the lawyer and became the man. Then he sounded lonely and adrift: a foreigner, she observed.³³ Edward once told Emily that he felt his entire life had been passed in a wilderness or on an island. She knew what he meant. She could hear the way his voice often sounded faraway and removed—a “sea tone,” she called it.³⁴ The last afternoon they were together, she heard that voice again. It had been during the legislative recess, when Edward was working so late in his law office. “The last Afternoon that my Father lived,” she later wrote, “though with no premonition – I preferred to be with him, and invented an absence for Mother, Vinnie being asleep. He seemed peculiarly pleased as I oftenest stayed with myself, and remarked as the Afternoon withdrew, he ‘would like it not to end.’ His pleasure almost embarrassed me,” she continued, “and my Brother coming – I suggested they walk. Next morning I woke him for the train – and saw him no more.” Edward’s vulnerability in their last moments together was too much for Emily to bear. “His Heart was pure and terrible,” she said, “and I think no other like it exists.”³⁵

After hearing the news, Mr. Higginson wrote Emily gently. Are you working yet? Are you able to read? Yes, she replied. She was able to dip into books, but grief had overpowered her ability to concentrate.³⁶ Emily wanted Higginson to come again to Amherst. She always did. It would be priceless, she told him, precious.³⁷ But his schedule would not permit it and so she spent months shuffling around in what she called “Little – wayfaring acts.”³⁸ She visited with her father’s old friend Judge Otis Lord, who was in Amherst for a week, gathered up fruit for neighbors, and sent orders to Cutler’s stores for family provisions: 10 cents’ worth of brown sugar, 1 can of corn, 1 cup prunes, 35 bars of soap, and 2 corsets—one later returned.³⁹ She also made out her will. Oddly, Edward Dickinson had not prepared a document, leaving Austin to sort out everything. Now more keenly aware of the problems such a situation could produce, Emily wrote her final wishes, bequeathing to Vinnie “all my estate, real and personal, to have and to hold the same to her and her heirs, and assigns forever.” Judge Lord’s wife, Elizabeth, served as one of the witness to her signature. Neighbor Luke Sweetser and Margaret Maher, the Dickinsons’ faithful maid, were the others.⁴⁰ Grief continued to weigh on her. “Affection . . . helps me up the Stairs at Night,” she wrote.⁴¹ The books her father had selected in Boston before his last trip home—the Theodore Parker and Mrs. Lewes—lay unread in the family library. She did not have the strength to open, let alone read, them.⁴² Emily wanted Higginson to have the books—a gesture linking the two most important men in her life. He demurred at first, a bit embarrassed, as he had been when Emily offered the postcard of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s grave that Josiah Holland had given her. Why she always was quick to give away personal gifts, he must have wondered.†† Before Emily could restore herself emotionally, another family tragedy hit. Almost a year to the day her husband died, Emily Norcross Dickinson suffered a stroke. Her memory was impaired, she wandered around the house looking for Edward, and paralysis weakened her hand and foot. Her “Will followed my Father,” Emily said, “and only an idle Heart is left, listless for his sake.”⁴³ Once again, shades at the Homestead were drawn, and the rooms were saturated with the smell of camphor and roses.⁴⁴ Higginson wrote with his concern and inquired again if she had the concentration to write. This time Emily was definitive. “You asked me if I wrote now,” she said. “I have no other Playmate.”⁴⁵

The losses altered everyone in the family. Austin “set a face of flint to the world,” some said.⁴⁶ He was worried about Ned’s health, made constant visits across the path to check on his mother and sisters, sometimes eating his breakfast there instead of at home. He also took on more work. Amherst College Trustees appointed him treasurer of the college, succeeding his father and grandfather. The new position meant additional income, but it came with headaches. Austin discovered the college books were not in the best order, and he found it exasperating to manage the college’s money in the first place. “It is the most almighty queer thing that I should be picked out to spend my life handling dirty money,” he said. “I don’t care a thing about it!”⁴⁷ One day at the Amherst train station, he lost his temper completely. As Austin waited to board, a friend got off. Neighbors greeted the man cheerfully and asked about a recent fishing trip. Austin stood by, envious and fuming. In a voice loud enough for everyone to hear, he berated his friend for having fun, declaring he had little time for recreation. Townspeople stood with their mouths agape at Austin’s anger.⁴⁸ Nothing, however, pointed more to the aggrieved state of his mind than the way he drove his horse and carriage home every night. Mattie remembered her father would fly down the street at breakneck speed, heedless of who or what might be in his way. The horse’s nostrils flared, dust flew, and cats and the family’s favorite turkey scattered for cover. As he reached the house, Austin would turn the corner on one wheel and violently yank the horse to a stop at the carriage shed.⁴⁹ His actions were reckless, dangerous even. Perhaps he intended them to be.

For Vinnie, the family’s sorrow ended a chance for life on her own. Long ago, she had stopped going on walks with suitors. Mr. Howland, who gave her a ring when they were young, had settled into married life and had children. Another suitor, Joseph Lyman, was dead.‡‡ Vinnie once told Joseph she had half a mind to give up gentlemen admirers altogether, and by the age of forty-two she had.⁵⁰ When her father was alive, she feared her flirtations—or any action—would displease him. She still did. She said she felt she had a right to freedom, but was not strong enough to take it.⁵¹ Lavinia could not be called reclusive like Emily, but she spent more time at home than she used to. Once shopping for bonnets in Northampton—all of seven miles away—she admitted to being homesick.⁵² On summer nights, she often sat with Emily on the side terrace overlooking the garden. With Margaret’s help, they would drag the big Daphne odora from the conservatory and ring the sitting area with jasmine and tall oleanders in green tubs—a fortress of plants. When it came to the flowers and vines, Vinnie loved profusion, nothing pruned, everything in tumult.⁵³ She looked over the garden with its dense tangle and knew this was her life. She was not unhappy, exactly. With her father gone, she had risen in rank, becoming the family’s lieutenant: mindful of everyone’s needs, protecting Emily’s privacy, and keeping track of commitments, invitations, and grudges. Mattie said she admired her aunt’s ability to locate anything from a lost quotation to last year’s muffler.⁵⁴ But to Emily, Vinnie shouldered an invisible burden. My sister, she said, lives in “the State of Regret.”⁵⁵

With her father gone, Emily almost missed the family obligations she once dreaded. For decades during Amherst College commencement as guests spilled out over the lawn and crowded the house, she would position herself by the east window in the dining room, next to the sherry decanter. From six in the evening until eight, she stood with a flower in her hand and dutifully poured wine for guests. She remembered the bread she baked for her father—round loaves so there would be more crust.⁵⁶ When she looked at her enfeebled mother, it was difficult to recall a time when Emily Norcross Dickinson supervised the entire house: banging carpets every spring, gathering eggs in her apron, and remembering to send shoe blacking to her daughter at Mount Holyoke. It was even more difficult to imagine her mother as a young woman who had moved away from her family to study chemistry in New Haven. Few people—including Emily—credited her mother with having intellectual interests. Too often all they saw was a quiet woman who stirred custard and mended socks. Now at night Mrs. Dickinson called out and could not understand why Edward wasn’t home. “Home is so far from Home, since my Father died,” Emily wrote.⁵⁷ With both daughters tied to her mother’s needs, Emily asked neighbors to mail her letters and packages. Seventy-year-old Luke Sweetser took Emily’s postings and sent them off.⁵⁸ But for private letters, Emily entrusted only Elizabeth Holland. Mrs. Holland had been sending Emily’s letters to Reverend Wadsworth for years, addressing them in her own hand and mailing them from her residence in New York City. Now back in Philadelphia after years in San Francisco, Charles Wadsworth was leading a new church, and still earning acclaim for his powerful words. “I once more come, with my little Load,” Emily wrote to Mrs. Holland, thanking her for “beloved Acts, both revealed and covert.”⁵⁹

Sue also felt Edward Dickinson’s loss. She tried her best to send one of the children over with “some dainty” each Sunday for her mother-in-law, but she was too busy to do it as often as she’d like.⁶⁰ A friend worried Sue looked “used up.”⁶¹ During one commencement, both children had the measles and it was all she could do to deal with guests and her children’s fevers. Austin did not seem to pay much attention to Sue or his son and daughter. On one of his many visits to New York to frequent art galleries and buy landscape paintings, he neglected to retrieve Mattie from one of his stops, and several hours later found her sitting in front of a seascape and staring at the waves.⁶² After Edward’s death, Sue took Ned and Mattie and joined her brother at a resort hotel in Swampscott, where she walked the rocky ledges above the Atlantic. Young Mattie wouldn’t go near the ocean. The force terrified her. “The tide was enough,” she later said, “and too much.”⁶³ Sometimes Sue would stay away from Amherst and Austin for a month at a time, and Emily knew all was not well.⁶⁴ After Edward died and before Emily Norcross Dickinson suffered her stroke, Sue learned she was pregnant—again. On August 1, 1875, she gave birth to her third child—a son, Thomas Gilbert. Gib they called him. Sue was forty-four years old with a son who was fourteen, a daughter who was eight, a crying infant—and a husband who had removed himself. Life was so upended, she must have wished for nothing more than Edward’s Sunday-morning knock at the door. The coffee at the Homestead had always been too weak for her father-in-law. He would steal over to the Evergreens for a secret cup. Like Edward, Susan sought quiet, order, and a strong brew.⁶⁵

The fall of 1875, when Gib was born, Helen Hunt was again in New England. But she wasn’t making her usual gallop around the countryside gathering research for essays. She was getting married. “Peggy” and Will had a small wedding at the home of Helen’s sister, who had moved to Wolfboro, New Hampshire, in the White Mountains. Emily sent a congratulatory note and a few lines from a longer poem she had written earlier. “Have I a word but Joy?” she wrote, adding,

Who fleeing from the Spring

The Spring avenging fling

To Dooms of Balm – ⁶⁶

Helen was pleased to hear from Emily, but baffled by the verse. What did “dooms” mean and how did the idea of calamity connect to her wedding? In her usual direct way, Helen asked Dickinson for an explication, and sent the poem back, along with a warning. “This is mine, remember,” she wrote. “You must send it back to me, or else you will be a robber.”⁶⁷ Emily did not return the verse, at least not right away, and Helen was on her again. “You did not send it back, though you wrote that you would. Was this an accident, or a late withdrawal of your consent? Remember that it is mine – not yours – and be honest.”⁶⁸ Sensing she might be overstepping her bounds, Helen offered reassurance that she simply wanted to understand what Emily meant.§§ She also reiterated her long desire to see Emily. She always was full of questions and had many for her girlhood friend. Mainly she could not understand Emily’s ambivalence toward publication. For Helen, every essay or poem needed to find its way into print. Publishing always was the final step—for reasons of both ambition and money. But to Emily, publication was far from her mind. Helen confronted her in a letter. “When you are what men call dead,” she said, “you will be sorry you were so stingy.”⁶⁹ Emily might have shrugged off the remark or even been amused by the force of it, but she could not ignore another sentence. In more personal tones, Helen told Emily she hoped they would get to know each other better, and write from time to time—only when it does not bore you, she added. Then she declared what she most wanted to say. “You are a great poet,” she said, “and it is a wrong to the day you live in, that you will not sing aloud.”⁷⁰ Emily always remembered when someone called her a poet: the word was almost too sacred to be uttered, let alone claimed. She recalled something Judge Lord had once told her: the joy we most revere, we profane in taking.⁷¹ As much as sharing her poems with the world unsettled her, she at least was willing to listen to Mrs. Jackson. Emily and Helen made a plan. Next fall, when Helen Jackson was on her annual trek through New England, she would call at the Dickinson Homestead. Emily could only imagine what Mrs. Jackson would say next.

That autumn as students began the new term at Amherst College, Professor Ebenezer Snell went about his usual tasks: teaching, checking his weather apparatus three times a day, and recording meteorological details. On Friday, September 15, 1876, he walked up the hill to the college and met with all his classes, but he felt odd. He was light-headed, and fainted. He blacked out several more times at home and grew increasingly weak. His family sent for the doctor, who did not have good news. Ebenezer Snell was rapidly declining, he said. He did not expect him to live through the weekend. That Monday, when Emily heard the college bells toll, she knew why. Professor Snell was dead at age seventy-four. “I had a father once,” she wrote the family—a single sentence conveying her condolence.⁷² College officers said no one could compare to Ebenezer Snell. He was in the first graduating class of the college and taught generations of Amherst students for half a century. Although he had little money, they said he was one of the college’s greatest benefactors—giving all he had in service to Amherst.⁷³ Snell’s family knew his tender side. He never got over the idea that although people who loved each other might be apart, they could gaze up at the sky and see the same stars and the same moon.⁷⁴ The scientist in him understood the phenomenon, but the poet in him appreciated the wonder. During his brief illness, the meteorological journal Snell kept so meticulously did not miss a day. His daughter Sabra collected the measurements. She had been working by her father’s side for some time and shared his devotion to the record. On the day her father died, she pulled down his heavy leather ledger and entered the data just as he had instructed her to do: “61 degrees. Stratus, minimal clouds.”¶¶ In the remarks column where Ebenezer Snell once noted all the atmospheric phenomena that thrilled him—halos, and parhelia, and the blazing Northern Lights—she made a simple notation: “Professor Snell died Rainy day.”⁷⁵

Several weeks later, on October 9, Helen Jackson was in New England as planned. She stood at the base of a mountain and looked up. The Mount Holyoke summit towered above her, but she was undaunted. Before seeing Emily Dickinson the next day, she wanted to spend the night at a hotel on top of the mountain. One time, when Helen was researching a travel article about a cog railroad that transported passengers to the top of New Hampshire’s Mount Washington, she had convinced the conductor to let her ride outside the train engine for a better view.⁷⁶ If she survived the 2,700-foot ascent of Mount Washington, surely she could tackle Mount Holyoke’s 935 feet. To reach the top, she had three options. She could tramp two miles to the summit. She could climb 522 steps up a rustic staircase. Or she could choose the most precarious way: the Old Sleigh. Workers had created a cable funicular by nailing two wooden sleighs together to form a cart. A single rope then hoisted four passengers to the top—two facing forward and two backward. A horse, sometimes a team of oxen, and later a steam engine did the hoisting. The Old Sleigh was not for the timid. As the horse moved the rope around a turntable below, the sleigh would lurch unpredictably, sending passengers perilously close to the edge. When the contraption finally made its way to the summit, the sleigh rolled to an opening near the Prospect House.## That’s where Helen would spend the night. From the mountain peak, she could see everything familiar to her: thirty-eight towns, Mount Holyoke Female Seminary, and Amherst College. A telescope positioned at the drop-off allowed her to see even farther. The hotel staff said that if you looked through the glass, you could set your watch by the clock tower at the United States Armory all the way down in Springfield. That night, when Helen stood on the hotel’s wide wraparound porch, the view was especially beautiful. The Connecticut River curled like a ribbon through dark-green pastures. Sometimes a blanket of fog settled on the valley making pumpkin fields and barns disappear. What made the view so exceptional, people said, was the perspective. There were no foothills to obstruct the scene or long slopes that made the world seem distant. While Helen could see for miles, the view had a human scale. She could trace all the roads that had brought her to this single spot.⁷⁷

The next morning, Emily Dickinson came down from her chamber and waited. On those rare occasions when she did agree to see friends—Bowles, Abby Wood, Higginson—the calls had been social. But Emily knew Helen wanted to talk business. Months earlier she had sent Dickinson a circular from a publisher in Boston, announcing the start of an unusual series of books. “The Messrs. Roberts Brothers, of Boston will begin soon the publication of a series of original American novels and tales,” a newspaper reported, “to be published anonymously under the title of ‘No Name.’”⁷⁸ The idea for the series had come from Thomas Niles Jr., a brilliant editor known for spotting new talent and stirring up excitement. Niles predicted that curious readers would buy the books and enjoy speculating about who had written them. Helen knew Mr. Niles planned a volume of anonymous poetry further down the line, featuring both famous and unpublished poets. Like many publishers, Niles was especially interested in presenting the work of women writers. The series would be perfect for Emily, Helen thought. “Authors like it hugely,” Niles wrote a friend. “The idea of being able to write fearlessly, intrenched behind an anonymous, and all the critics at bay, is pleasing. We shall all have a good deal of fun.”⁷⁹ Niles had made a name for himself at Roberts Brothers by encouraging Louisa May Alcott to write what he called a girls’ story. Little Women had been a success for both Alcott and Niles. He asked Miss Alcott if she might consider writing for No Name. Anything she wanted, he said, perhaps a novel full of mystery and suspense.*** Knowing authors might risk writing something not in their usual style, he assured Alcott and others that anonymity would be guaranteed. He hired copyists to transcribe manuscripts and made sure even Roberts Brothers employees did not know the identities of No Name writers. The first book already had been released: Mercy Philbrick’s Choice. Like many of the volumes to come, it focused on New England and the lives of women—and was a sensation. Nearly 4,000 books sold in two months and newspapers across the country were filled with conjecture about the author. It’s Louisa May Alcott, one newspaper reported. No, it’s Harriet Beecher Stowe, another guessed. Louisa Chandler Moulton, Harriet Prescott Spofford, Susan Coolidge, others proposed.^††† To make it easy to track the possibilities, Niles included a blank page in the back of each book entitled “GUESSES AT THE AUTHORSHIP of MERCY PHILBRICK’S CHOICE.”⁸⁰

As Helen’s carriage pulled into Amherst on October 10, 1876, the town was empty. The college had declared Tuesday to be Mountain Day, and students took the day off to enjoy the outdoors. Many Amherst College faculty were not present anyway; they were off visiting the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia. Helen had already made the trip to celebrate the anniversary of the nation’s first one hundred years—an experience she labeled a great chore.⁸¹ She preferred the countryside, not a quarter of a million people crammed into stuffy exhibition halls. From down the road, Mattie Dickinson could see Mrs. Jackson’s carriage passing Phoenix Row. Her father was away at the exposition, but with fourteen-month-old Gib teething and Ned’s troubles developing into a rheumatic heart—her mother was at home. She had told Mattie all about Mrs. Jackson. The girl was so full of anticipation she called the day one of the “excitingest” moments of her young life.⁸² Mattie peered out the window as the team of gray horses came to a stop. Mrs. Jackson stepped out, fluffed her full skirts, and marched right up to the Homestead. Aunt Emily’s door opened and then it closed. For the rest of the afternoon, all Mattie would see was the livery driver walking his horses down to a tree, then turning around, and walking back to Homestead’s front gate—over and over again.⁸³

Emily took pride in her appearance. She always did—the clean white dress, the brown velvet net over her hair.‡‡‡ For special occasions, she would add a white-and-gold cameo pin or wear a small watch draped from her belt. When Helen first saw her, she was shocked. Emily looked small, mothlike, and pale.⁸⁴ Helen wondered if she had been ill and asked about Emily’s health, regretting almost immediately the words that fell out of her mouth. In Dickinson’s delicate presence, Helen said she felt like an ox and thought she sounded clumsy and stupid.⁸⁵ Emily took no offense. She found Helen kind and noble, and worried more about disturbing her or doing something that might turn her away.⁸⁶ But Dickinson knew why Helen was there, and it was not to discuss her appearance. She wanted to talk about the circular. Emily had not tossed it away as she had Miss P’s letter soliciting poems. They began talking. Will you give me some poems for Roberts Brothers, Helen asked. She appreciated Emily’s desire for privacy and offered to copy the verses in her own hand to ensure double anonymity. Helen abhorred publicity herself, and turned down requests for speaking engagements, even when Higginson encouraged her otherwise. She said public attention was foreign to her instinct and she lacked the courage to address an audience.⁸⁷ Helen’s work always had appeared under a pseudonym, if not H.H.—then Saxe Holm, Rip Van Winkle, or Jane Silsbee. Friends said Helen once bit off Louisa Moulton’s head when Moulton reviewed one of her books and referred to her by name rather than her pseudonym.§§§⁸⁸ Yet as much as Helen understood the use of a pen name, she could not understand why Emily did not publish at all. When Emily said how much she had enjoyed Mrs. Jackson’s recent book of verses, Helen saw an opening to make her case. Surely your poems would give others pleasure, she told Dickinson.⁸⁹ Emily listened carefully, sitting as she usually did on a straight-backed chair with her hands neatly folded. But Dickinson thought she owed the public nothing. Her devotion was to the work itself, not the world. A poem she had among her loose sheets placed the importance on the poetry, not the poet. It was the words themselves that lived.

The Poets light but Lamps –

Themselves – go out –

The Wicks they stimulate

If vital Light

Inhere as do the Suns –

Each Age a Lens

Disseminating their

Circumference – ⁹⁰

It was not so much that Emily didn’t believe in publishing. She didn’t want to engage in the advertising that went along with it. Perhaps her poems might become public sometime, but now was not the time. She wanted to hold on to verses, reworking them, mining them for other poems, “Our own Possessions though our own / ’Tis well to hoard anew,” she wrote.⁹¹ She had written a hundred or more new poems over the past few years, and many Helen would like: “A little Madness in the Spring,” “The Heart is the Capital of the Mind,” and “There is no Frigate like a Book.” There were scores of fragments, too, jotted down between tending to her mother and helping Margaret prepare supper: phrases written on a note to the dressmaker, a few words on the back of the Massachusetts Agricultural College commencement program, a line or two on Mrs. Kingman’s bill for milk. Once her family had discovered a complete poem written on the flyleaf of Edward Dickinson’s edition of Washington Irving. “The most pathetic thing I do,” the poem began, “Is play I hear from you.”⁹² But even with so many poems—both old and new—to choose from, Emily believed her verses were not yet ready, and she felt incapable of agreeing to Mrs. Jackson’s request. She told her no, but Helen did not accept the answer. She thought Emily was perfectly able of writing poems and seeing them through to print. She even carried some Dickinson verses in her own valise and knew many by heart. She offered to help Emily choose which poems to include in the Roberts Brothers book. But then Helen started talking too forcefully and fell right back into pushing too hard: she accused Emily of wanting to live in darkness. Sensing Dickinson’s unease, Helen changed course, telling Emily she need not make a decision immediately. Jackson was patient, but she would not give up. As they said goodbye, the two women clasped hands. The day was beautiful. Fall colors were at their peak: sugar maples already orange and oaks turning brown. The hemlocks outside Emily’s front door stood tall like sentinels. The livery driver who had been waiting with the horses assisted Mrs. Jackson into the coach. As the team headed north out of town, Helen could almost still feel Emily’s hand in hers. It felt to her like a wisp.⁹³

AFTER HELEN’S VISIT, Emily had second thoughts. She worried she had said the wrong thing, and fretted she had handled the conversation poorly. She looked at the No Name circular, folded it, and put it in a letter to Mr. Higginson, asking for advice and an alibi. “I am sorry to flee so often to my safest friend,” she wrote. She hoped he would be willing to write Helen, saying he disapproved of Dickinson publishing her verse. Helen will believe you, she said.⁹⁴ But Higginson misunderstood the request and thought Mrs. Jackson had asked Emily to submit short stories or a novel for the series. Fiction is not in your line, he told Emily, unaware that Roberts Brothers had also planned a volume of verse.⁹⁵ Higginson left the decision up to Emily. Meanwhile, Helen spent a few days in Ashfield, a hilltown near Amherst. The weather had turned sharply colder and snow had fallen. “Cold as Greenland,” she wrote in her diary.⁹⁶ Austin had returned from the expedition and come down with chills and fever. Perhaps Helen had been right: the Philadelphia Centennial was unhealthy. Sue consulted a physician in Springfield, who diagnosed Austin with malaria. Remember he is not of common clay, Sam Bowles wrote Sue.⁹⁷ Sue handed her husband glasses of quinine and brandy.⁹⁸

Faithful to her word, Helen did not give up. She wrote Emily from Ashfield and apologized for being pushy, but then she pushed again. She had spent the morning looking over Emily’s poems—the last batch Dickinson had sent her. She continued to find a few verses inscrutable, but when she read them again and more deeply, she had determined that “the dimness must have been in me.”⁹⁹ Still, she liked the most direct poems best, the ones whose words did not baffle the way that “dooms” had in the wedding verse Dickinson had sent. Later back home in Colorado, Helen resumed the campaign, telling Emily she herself would contribute to the volume. It would be fun, she added, having the two of them participate in the national guessing game. Could you do it for me as a personal favor? she pleaded.¹⁰⁰ Emily wavered. It “almost seems sordid to refuse from myself again,” she wrote Higginson.¹⁰¹ Thomas Niles was busy assembling copy for the book, and had been in touch with Mrs. Jackson. Already he had secured poems from Louisa May Alcott, Bronson Alcott, William Ellery Channing, Annie Fields, Sidney Lanier, Rose Hawthorne Lathrop, James Russell Lowell, Christina Rossetti, and Celia Thaxter.¹⁰² In her continued appeals to Dickinson, Helen reduced the number of poems she asked her to contribute. First she had requested “some,” then one or two, and then finally only a single verse—a poem she had always loved and had memorized. Emily had written the poem almost two decades before and had published it during the Civil War in the Brooklyn Daily Union. Helen may not have realized the verse represented an idea that had absorbed Dickinson all her life. It was a poem about the reach, the miss, and the poignancy of the almost. No one knew the space between effort and accomplishment better than Dickinson:

Success is counted sweetest

By those who ne’re succeed.

To comprehend a Nectar

Requires the sorest need.

Not one of all the Purple Host

Who took the flag to-day,

Can tell the definition,

So plain, of Victory,

As he defeated, dying,

On whose forbidden ear

The distant strains of triumph

Break, agonizing clear.¹⁰³

Emily gave Helen permission to submit the poem. She had been worn down by repeated requests, and finally relented to turn the poem over to Thomas Niles. In truth, it would be the third time Emily had directly submitted her own work for publication. The first was Forest Leaves back when she was a schoolgirl at Amherst Academy. The second was more recently, when Mattie had asked her to contribute to a short-lived neighborhood newspaper, The Fortnightly Bumble Bee—the name for the publication suggested by Aunt Emily herself.¹⁰⁴ But with “Success is counted sweetest” in the new volume from Roberts Brothers, Emily achieved something she had never accomplished in her life: her first poem published in a book she could hold in her hands.

The years Helen Jackson spent urging Emily to publish her poems had made Dickinson respect Helen all the more. No one else felt such a mission in trying to convince Emily to share her work with the world. Thomas Niles was ecstatic to include Dickinson’s poem in the 1878 publication of A Masque of Poets, and he gave the verse a prominent place at the end of a section. Helen was pleased, too, and grateful. “I hope you have not regretted giving me that choice bit of verse for it,” she wrote.¹⁰⁵ No one guessed Emily Dickinson was the author of “Success is counted sweetest.” The poem had been altered slightly and had a title attached to it, “Success”—but she voiced no concerns. Thomas Niles wrote Emily directly and sent a complimentary copy of the book. The guessing game over “Success” elicited much speculation, he told her. Most people thought Ralph Waldo Emerson had written the poem. In Concord, Mr. Emerson set the record straight. He did not write the poem, Emerson said. He had not submitted a verse to the volume at all. Readers do not like my poetry much, he said.¹⁰⁶

* Daniel Bliss was president of the Syrian Protestant College from 1866 to 1902. The college is now American University in Beirut and enrolls nearly 9,000 students.

† Some scholars report Bowles called Dickinson “a damned wretch.” By “washing the adjective,” she meant she had deleted the “damned.” [L515.]

‡ Most critics believe “Miss P” was novelist, poet, and essayist Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, although Dickinson biographer Alfred Habegger suggests she might have been Elizabeth Peabody. [Alfred Habegger, My Wars Are Laid Away in Books: The Life of Emily Dickinson (New York: Random House, 2001), 545.]

§ Mary Ann Evans also was known by her married name, Mrs. George Henry Lewes. She wrote under the pseudonym, George Eliot.

¶ The opening poem of Emily Fowler Ford’s book of poetry confirmed the assessment of the Springfield Republican reviewer: “I am no poet, and I know it./ But if a wild bloom lingers/ within my loving fingers/ From the woods I joyful bring it;/ In my sweet friend’s lap I fling it./ Can you blame me that I show it.” Years later after refusing a visit from Mrs. Ford and rejecting her offer to visit Brooklyn, Emily acknowledged receipt of her friend’s volume of verse. “The little Book will be subtly cherished,” she told her old friend—as noncommittal a statement as Dickinson ever wrote. [L781.]

# The nearly five-mile-long Hoosac Tunnel was constructed in the Berkshires of Western Massachusetts near the town of North Adams. Until the twentieth century, it was the longest tunnel in North America. The tunnel opened in 1875, and still is used today for freight rail service.

** A Boston doctor conjectured Edward’s cause of death was apoplexy—what would now be considered a stroke. Later the family discovered the physician had administered morphine to Mr. Dickinson. That drug was poison to Father, Austin said.

†† Higginson appears to have accepted the book of George Eliot poems, informing Emily he already owned the Parker biography.

‡‡ William Howland moved to Lynn, Massachusetts, where he worked as a lawyer for the rest of his life. He died in 1880. After his romance with Lavinia in 1854, Joseph Lyman married, had children, and became a New York journalist. He died in 1872.

§§ Dickinson scholar Jay Leyda later found the poem among Helen Hunt Jackson’s papers, years after her death. [Richard B. Sewall, The Life of Emily Dickinson (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1974), 580.]

¶¶ For the next twenty-six years, Sabra Snell would continue recording weather data in the journal started by her father.

## Emily Dickinson made the trek to the top of Mount Holyoke along with Vinnie and several friends on October 9, 1849. Her name still appears in the Prospect House registry. [Jay Leyda, The Years and Hours of Emily Dickinson, vol. 1 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1960), 158–59.]

*** In 1877 the No Name series issued Louisa May Alcott’s A Modern Mephistopheles, a dark thriller based on Goethe’s Faust. In her journal, Alcott wrote that she enjoyed writing the novel, “being tired of providing moral pap for the young.” [Louisa May Alcott, Little Women: An Annotated Edition, ed. Daniel Shealy (Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2013), 2.]

††† Helen Hunt Jackson wrote Mercy Philbrick’s Choice, and some characters in the novel bear a striking resemblance to Dickinson. “One cannot walk through the streets of a New England village,” the book began, “without being impressed by a sense of the futile semblance of barrier, this touching effort of withdrawal and reticence.” The main character is a shy woman with poetic sensibilities—a woman who led a secluded life, and whose personality was marked by “the loneliness of intense individuals.” Some local readers thought Dickinson may have been the novel’s author. [Karen Dandurand, “Dickinson and the Public,” in Martin Orzbeck and Robert Weisbuch eds., Dickinson and Audience (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996), 272–73; Leyda, vol. 2, 257.] The No Name series ran between 1876 and 1886 and published a total of thirty-seven volumes. Each book was bound in green cloth with symbols of good luck on the cover: a four-leaf clover and a horseshoe.

‡‡‡ Emily cared about the way she looked and once apologized to Sue, who had dropped by for a quick visit. “I would have liked to be beautiful and tidy when you came,” she wrote her sister-in-law. “You will excuse me, wont you. . . . How it would please me if you would come once more, when I was palatable.” [L383.]

§§§ When the Springfield Republican revealed Helen Hunt had written a series of anonymous short stories, she was furious with Samuel Bowles and wrote him directly. “I will not be found out,” she later wrote a friend, “not even to sell 10 000 of the book in one week!” [Leyda, Vol. 2, 216.] To another friend she said, “I intend to deny it, till I die. Then I wish it to be known.” [Kate Phillips, Helen Hunt Jackson: A Literary Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 198.]