Life and Letters of Emily Dickinson

PART I

LIFE

I

ANCESTRY

There was nothing in the parentage or direct heredity of Emily Dickinson to account for her genius. There was equally nothing to impede its course or contradict its authority. It claimed her without those dissenting elements of being which came to her from her ideally mated but completely opposite father and mother. Her parents did not interfere with her actual life and behavior, both because they never realized her preoccupation quite fully, and because they had no will to destroy the individuality of anyone of their three children.

Nothing could have been more alien to any of the Dickinsons than a desire to be peculiar—queer they would have called it—or to do what the later generation calls pose. Eccentricity consciously indulged in would have merely been reprimanded as bad manners. Their dignity was of the stiff, reserved type resenting the least encroachment on its individuality in character and privacy in habit—which they insured by conforming handsomely to the sense of their community, the laws of their state and country, and the will of God as expounded from pulpits of the white meeting-house in Hadley and later in Amherst, where the colonial train of Emily Dickinson’s ancestors undeviatingly worshipped. There was no allowance made in her family for oddity—temperament had not been discovered yet. There was no exception to what was expected of each of the children alike, her sister Lavinia, her brother Austin, and herself. What Emily did succeed in evading and eluding and imagining and believing, and setting down for those who came after her to profit by, was her own performance, dictated by her own need for the solitude in which to write, and the time necessary for thought. She was spared none of her share in the household duties, nor did she wish to be.

Before one thinks of her as a poet and philosopher or mystic, one must in honesty remember her as an adoring and devoted daughter, a sister loyal to blows, a real nun of the home, without affectation or ritual beyond that of her gentle daily task, and all that she could devise of loving addition to the simple sum. To one who loved her it is unthinkable that she could ever be supposed to have consciously secreted herself, or self-consciously indulged in whim or extravaganza in living, which her fine breeding would have been the first to discard as vulgar and unworthy. It was her absorption in her own world that made her unaware often of the more visible world of those who never see beyond it. It was not that she was introspective, egoistic, and selfish—rather that she dwelt so far out in the changing beauty of Nature, in the loves and joys and sorrows of the dear ones she held closest, in the simple drama of the neighborhood, and most of all the stupendous and sometimes revealing wonder of life and death and the Almighty God thundered at her from the high pulpit on Sundays—and known so differently in her own soul the other days of the week—that she never thought of Emily Dickinson at all; never supposed anyone watched her way of living or worshipping or acting. She never had time in all the vivid, thrilling, incessant programme of night and day, summer and winter, bird and flower, the terror lest evil overtake her loved ones, the glory in their least success—never stopped in her flying wild hours of inward rapture over a beauty perceived or a winged word caught and spun into the fabric of her thought—to wonder or to care if no one knew she was, or how she proceeded in the behavior of her own small tremendous affair of life.

Her heredity is distinctly traced for nine generations in America. Her first local ancestor settled in old Hadley and a later generation was one of the founders of the church and town of Amherst. There were Dickinsons mentioned in Hadley among the first letters of the original Indian grants in 1659. And when in 1714 the order was given for five men to superintend the erection of a new meeting-house in the middle of two streets, one of them was a Dickinson. There was also an ancestor in the famous Shays’s Rebellion in 1786. Before that, in England, the stock from which she came was clear for thirteen generations more. Further than that her father’s curiosity or pride had never gone in research.

Her own grandfather, Samuel Fowler Dickinson, was the first of her direct line in Amherst. His connection with the establishment of Amherst Academy, from which the College later sprang, is familiar local history. In his fervor for the in-bringing of the Kingdom he foresaw the universal education of ministers, and calculated the millennium in the near future of about seven years. He was educated at Dartmouth College, a man of sincere piety, and a generosity that was his financial ruin. In a letter from his sister, Emily’s Aunt Lucretia, to his son Edward at Yale, the following passage occurs. It is dated 1821:

Father left in the yellow gig for the Bay Road this morning. He has gone to Boston by coach to see about getting a charter for something they propose to call Amherst College. He looked so fine in his white beaver and new great coat.

Until this ardent enthusiast, almost bigot, lost all the money he had not previously given away in his fanaticism for education and religion, the family throve and were favorably known for this world’s prosperity as well as in matters of piety and attainment.

His oldest son Edward, who was the father of Emily, was brought up strictly and with a regard for the needs of the missionaries first. He was sent to Yale College, driven there, too, in the family chaise upon at least one trip mentioned in the family correspondence. The family letters during that period are happily at hand and throw a profound and touching atmosphere about these earlier days of education, when it was a sacred boon possible to the few through fierce sacrifice, often, on the part of those who gave it, and not to be entered into with less than a consecrated spirit of trust for those to whom it was to be returned, transformed into a wisdom that was to help save the world.

In one letter from Samuel, who was a deacon for forty years in the First Church and whose zeal was sleepless, to Edward, his son, this passage strikes its own contrast to modern fathers and sons.

December 17, 1819, he writes:

It is good news to hear of your good health and conduct. I rejoice to hear that the government of the college pleases you—that so much attention is paid to moral and religious instruction. Learning and science without morality and religion are like a man without a soul. They probably would do hurt rather than good. No man is a neuter in the world. His actions, his example, his concepts, his motives are all tending either to that which is good or evil.

He concludes:

Remember the importance of the present time and never forget our hereafter.

Your affectionate parent

SAMUEL FOWLER DICKINSON

Again, in 1819, he writes enclosing five dollars with which to discharge all obligations Edward may have entered into. He adds:

Consider the importance of every action as going to form character. Always be manly but do not expend more than you can pay, remembering that nothing is spent without sufficient cause. There are necessary uses for all our money.

Again, later on:

I hear the religious attention continues at New Haven. If, Edward, I could learn that you were among the number who had embraced the Saviour how joyful the news! Pray for a new heart. Never forget your morning and evening supplication for such mercies as you need, and most of all for your great salvation. You know we place much confidence in your upright and honourable deportment and your strict attention to every religious and moral duty.

Edward Dickinson grew up to be a rather haughty, austere man, shy and gentle, laconic and strict. He dressed in broadcloth at all times, and wore a black beaver hat glossy beyond compare with that of any young beau, and carried a handsome cane to and from his law office on the Main Street of his village. About his neck was wound a black satin stock pinned with a jet and diamond pin, with a lock of his wife’s hair at the back. His hair was a dark auburn, and his eyes those that Emily repeated in time. He was on the Governor’s staff as a young man and his honorable discharge with flattering mention of his services is still preserved.

He followed the family profession and went into the law, practising in Amherst, pleading at the Hampshire County Bar, settling the disputes of his friends and neighbors, and drawing the deeds that no modern court has ever been able to set aside or adjudge not binding. He was a pillar in the First Church, although he joined it later in life than was customary, and served its interests with utter fidelity. A gentleman of the old school he was, with a distinction that was elegance, and many a laborer, among the aged recalling him in their own boyhood, spoke with respect amounting to reverence of The Old Squire. What he said he meant, was deeply burned into his legend.

Only one of his daughter Emily’s sparks of reckless fire flew from his sedate characteristics—his nearest approach to self-indulgence was his sly liking for a horse handsome and fleet. I always intend to have the best horse in town, he said more than once, as he set off for the court in the shire town across the river. And his lifelong next neighbor, Deacon Luke Sweetser, made this no easy ambition. There was just a hint of the daughter’s later flashes in her father’s concession to this love of speed and shining form.

He admitted nothing in Emily as different from his other children, or from any daughter. He made no allowances for her—ever; and yet their unspoken intimacy went so deep it never came to the surface in words, but was never absent, diminished, or lost, or ceased to be even after his death had blasted her trust in life forever. If Father is asleep on the lounge the house is full, she often exclaimed. It expressed their understanding.

That the Squire was a proud man no one doubted, but that his name was the first on any subscription to relieve want or disaster, and that his eyes were capable of suffusing at the pain of an animal or trouble of the human heart, related him to Emily’s fire and dew quality.

His wife, Emily’s mother, was an exquisite little lady of the old school long passed into mythology. She was the daughter of Alfred Norcross, of Monson. The family were well-to-do and she was educated and finished off at a school for young ladies at New Haven, very much in repute in her day. Upon her marriage, no railroad then reaching Amherst, her dower was brought by several yoke of brindle oxen. Her mahogany was claw-footed and pine-apple cut; her silver had the basket of flowers on the handles; her bandboxes are still in the family possession—monstrous gay affairs, with scenes of Mount Vernon on one side and Paris on the other.

Emily Norcross Dickinson feared and honored her husband after the manner of the Old Testament. She trembled and flushed, obeyed and was silent before him. He was to her Jehovah, and she was to him the sole being to whom he entrusted the secrets of his inmost heart. His letters to her were discreet, respectful, frosty but kindly—ending always with the assurance of his remaining her most ob’t servant, Edward Dickinson.

On one occasion he wrote that he should see her at Northampton, being with the Governor as aide-de-camp, which will, he hopes, not be less agreeable to her than to him. A courtly pair, with not one glimmer of their transgressing Emily’s future escape from all their well-known landmarks of thought and divination.

The society of their village was also stately, and they later played their part therein, being often sought, or, as the time-worn little notes still show, Solicited, to an evening party by this or that prominent household, as Self and Lady, a form shared by even as pompous a host as Judge Delano, of Northampton. In 1821 Lucretia also stated, There have been some splendid parties this Winter in town—one at the Strong’s to which there were more than fifty invited. The lace shawls and India shawls, the gold-banded china and English blue, are mute witness to the social importance and obligation of the family, who did their part, whether any enjoyment was wrested from their conscientious performance or not, in keeping up the county standards of entertainment and hospitality.

It is impossible to derive Emily from either her stately father or her fluttering little mother, always timorous, always anxious. Treasured among the daughter’s most cherished papers, was found the little yellow certificate of her mother’s exemplary conduct as a girl at school:

Miss Emily Norcross, for punctual attendance, close application, good acquirements, and discreet behavior merits the approbation of her preceptress.

E. P. DUTCH

The aunts seem to have been the Greek chorus of the family, dire in their fatal appearances. Her Aunt Elizabeth, Emily pronounced the only male relative on the female side of my family. They were all married at a distance and imminent hourly for prolonged visitations. These invasions concluded the family circle, together with the uncles who were less disastrous to the plans of the children because they left sooner and paid less attention to them.

And out of this human stock and precision of living came the little girl whose soul flew up and away like the smoke from the high chimneys of her home under the tall pines.

II

CHILDHOOD

Emily Norcross Dickinson, named for her mother, was born December 11, 1830, in Amherst, Massachusetts, in the old house said to have been the first erected of brick in Amherst.

Her brother Austin and her younger sister Lavinia were the other children of the home, both possessed of marked ability and varied temperament.

Austin grew up to manhood with much of Emily’s poetic quality, fiercely suppressed—a lover of trees and beauty, one with Nature—like her, a hero-worshipper, a partisan, and a lover of all the rare and noble books whose faded brown Ticknor and Fields first editions still stand in deserted ranks on the bookshelves of his own library in his former home at Amherst. He graduated from Amherst College in 1850, and in 1854 from the Harvard Law School, and was admitted to the Hampshire County Bar. When he was about to leave Amherst to accept a legal partnership in Detroit, his father, overcome by the impending separation, offered to build him a home if he would remain. So all the adventurous hopes were stifled, and immediately upon his marriage he took up the practice of law as his father’s partner in the old office, since burned, which held many treasures of local history as well as a remarkably fine law library consulted far and wide throughout the region.

His marriage to the Sister Sue of Emily’s lifelong adoration brought an outside element into the family, which bred some critical hours. Brought up by a Knickerbocker great-aunt in a more cosmopolitan atmosphere, Susan Gilbert’s first celebration of Christmas in Amherst with wreaths of laurel in the windows almost upset the family apple cart, and Emily’s brother was accused by the scandalized Puritan neighbors of having married a Catholic.

But in all and for all his father was on her side, and came regularly all his life each Sabbath morning for a surreptitious cup of stronger coffee than home thought wise. It was just this freer aspect of life in Sister Sue that fascinated Emily and cast such a spell over her from the first. The old house under the tall pines, rebuilt in 1813, and the new house built after a whim of Austin’s in the style of an Italian villa, advertised the abyss that lay between the two generations.

The sister, Lavinia, was hardly less brilliant than Emily, but upon her, very early, depended the real solidarity of the family. A coquette from her cradle, very pretty, with a piercing wit and a rather bandit tongue, it became her lot to cover Emily’s delinquencies and support her mother’s gentle reign, increasingly enfeebled in spite of herself by the dominating daughter, and the powerful family maidservant who grew old along with them for almost forty years of unbroken service. It was Lavinia who knew where everything was, from a lost quotation to a last year’s muffler. It was she who remembered to have the fruit picked for canning, or the seeds kept for next year’s planting, or the perfunctory letters written to the aunts. It was Lavinia who leaped into the breach, when those unexpected guests drove up at nightfall—tearing her hair over a discrepant larder behind the scenes, but advancing all smiles and self-congratulation to receive the unwelcome invaders as they came up the double set of stone steps and into the front hall.

If Emily had been less Emily, Lavinia might have been more Lavinia. As it was, Lavinia carried the family honor to her grave as a sacred but rather acrid burden, and a few angels may have wept over her load when she laid it down, for sake of the self-renunciation its integrity implied. It was Lavinia who was thrown to the lions of every phase of dreary social duty, as she threw herself to those same beasts of anxious household routine. Always a brilliant mimic, a wit and wag, none could surpass her in her representations of the family circle, and in imitating the bass viol of the country choir her skill was supreme. She was said to be able to make her nose turn up at will, if her caricature demanded it, and when nothing aroused her animosity there was no one more amusing—not even Emily herself, whose bodyguard she became in their early thirties. Each had her own inner intimacies, and her own admirers in due time, and many they shared, but there is loving tribute due to the younger sister who must have always felt Emily’s peculiar genius as distinguishing her apart and above, and who proudly stood aside for her while many, many sought her out. They were so vividly Martha and Mary that it seems trite to call up the parallel: Lavinia with her wearing rectitude in household affairs, Emily with her sublime disregard of all detail; one living in the seen, the other in the unseen and scarcely to be imagined; both in adoring subjection to their parents, both jealously involved in their only brother’s success and happiness. And among them an outsider, differing in tradition and upbringing, Austin’s wife, with her broader youth and fulfilled happiness.

There is an artless painting of the three children, done by some itinerant painter, that gives them all three, at about the time their father’s letters began to mention them by name as little individuals; hoping Emily took care of her baby sister—a hope faintly to be justified, perhaps—and that Austin filled the wood box as he was told.

In the portrait Emily holds a book, but if her gaze was sibylline, it was beyond the vagrant artist’s power to portray, and she stares out as frankly as her younger sister, who clutches a stiff rose, and leans against her rather indifferent red-lipped brother with his jaunty air of superior pleasure in being the boy of the trio. Just the real New England family, one sees them, a young father and mother, with perhaps a degree more of prosperity and education and noble ideals to bless themselves with than the majority of those about them, and an endowment of native refinement deeply engrained.

The children went to the public schools like all the other children of their time in New England towns. Helen Fisk, the daughter of Professor Fisk, and later to be known as H. H. (Helen Hunt), so familiar in American literature, was their favorite playmate. There is a note still extant from Mrs. Fisk, in reply to one from Emily’s mother, begging that Helen may play with Emily and Vinnie under the syringas. It reads:

Professor Fisk will lead Helen over to play with Emily beneath the syringas, this afternoon. In case it prove not convenient to send her home, he will call for her in the chaise toward nightfall, before the dew falls.

What a picture of innocent pastime it leaves—little girls playing house under the sweet flowering syringa, to the hum of the bees, and safely restored to the family fold before the dew falls.

They went berrying and chestnutting; on grand occasions they drove in the pompous family cabriolet, lined with cream-colored broadcloth, with high doors and oval windows at the sides and back and framing in unexpected sections of horse and sky, as they moved, and from which the old-fashioned landscape looked formal and strange. Usually it was to spend the day with a relative at some distance or to attend a family funeral. There is no record of any less sedate amusement, but the child Emily got thrill enough out of the orioles nesting in the cherry tree, or the exploits of her pets, or the dark excitement of the great barn where in the afternoon the sunbeams piercing through a crack in the roof observed her as she hunted for the eggs hidden so skilfully from her deep eyes. The robins came back and the crows in the tall pines called to her almost by name. She was so truly one of Nature’s children herself that the daffodils dancing immemorial under the apple trees on the eastern slope of the dooryard every spring were as her own little guests returning. Except for her quickened sense of all beings, all creatures, all beauty, she differed little from other little girls of her time and town.

When she was sixteen the girl who was later to become her Sister Sue came to visit in Amherst, and then began the life that never ceased, of budding poetry and letters, affection and art, sympathy and love that surpassed the love real sisterhood often carelessly overlooks. Henceforth in all their girlish banditry, their secret frolics, their confidences, their love-affairs, their griefs and illnesses and disappointments, it was she of whom Emily always spoke as Sister Sue, who shared the overflow of the real hidden life of that unique genius in her stiff, clean, God-fearing New England home. When her mother’s astonishment and amazed concern summed itself up in a shrill cry, Why, Emily! How can you talk so!—or when her father evidenced displeasure by taking his hat and cane and passing out the door in silence, leaving an emptiness indicative of reproof, a wordless censure more devastating to her than any judgment day—it was to Sister Sue she fled for safety. Her timid imaginings were horrors worse than any actual event or punishment could ascribe.

There is no legend in the family that her father ever reproved her or called her to account in her various mishaps with duty. Probably his habitual dealing with culprits was after his own wisdom of criminals, and he knew her nature well enough to administer only his stern silence in her case.

Up to the time of her going away to school she was of rather precocious mentality, somewhat sentimental and given to girlish outpourings written in the accepted verbosity of the style of the mid-century (1845). Her flowers already claim a distinct part in her life. It is interesting to note also that at fourteen she announces herself as a Whig. She is interested in all the village happenings and when her father gives her a piano her life becomes crowded. She goes to singing school quite rapturously, and makes an herbarium of great variety and beauty, spending many afternoons off on the hillsides for her wild specimens. In one of her earliest letters preserved she makes fun of the future, saying, I am growing handsome. I expect I shall be the belle of Amherst when I reach my seventeenth year. I don’t doubt but that I shall have perfect crowds of admirers at that age—but away with my nonsense. All of which shows her a natural, silly, happy girl.

She has her garden and her house plants now and delights in her first real music lessons. She also is embroidering a book mark, which she admires. It is an arrow with a wreath about it—very beautiful. She does her hair up now and admits it makes me look different. The pieces she learns are The Grave of Bonaparte, Lancers Quickstep, and Maiden, Weep No More. She learns to make bread and stays out of school, as she is not strong, and needs more physical exercise. The winter of 1846 finds her out of school, but reciting German, as Mr. C., has a large class and Father thought I might never have another opportunity to study it. Her Christmas presents interest her vividly and she describes them at length in her letters to her friends. She says:

I had a perfume bag and a bottle of attar of rose to go with it, a sheet of music, a china mug, with forget-me-not on it, a toilet cushion, a watch case, a fortune teller, and an amaranthine stock of pin cushions and needle books which in ingenuity and art would rival the works of Scripture Dorcas. Also an abundance of candy.

In September of 1846 she made her first visit to Boston, alone. The ride in the cars she found delightful and the visit upon her aunt full of excitement. She went to Mount Auburn, Bunker Hill, the Chinese museum, attended two concerts and a horticultural exhibition; was taken, as she herself declares, On top of the State House and almost everywhere else you can imagine!

All the next spring she was fitting to go to South Hadley Seminary, studying algebra, Euclid, ecclesiastical history, and reviewing arithmetic. She was always in love with her teachers at that time, quite regardless of their being men or women, but whatever there was fanciful or romantic in her girl imagination she was surely grounded as firmly in the uncompromising fundamentals of education as her Puritan father saw fit to have her. Her anticipations were boundless and she only feared the sky would fall before the plan was realized. It had been in her dreams for a long time, yet she felt that it was part of her own nature always to anticipate more than to realize; a curious instinct in one so entirely normal with life just opening before her.

Her brother Austin had entered Amherst College the year before, and at his first commencement she describes herself as now very tall and wearing long dresses. One of her quaintest sentences slips in here between childhood and girlhood: I have perfect confidence in God and His promises—and yet I know not why, I feel the world has a predominant place in my affections.

The sweet secluded pleasures she shared—those pensive yet wistful glances at life, with shy though resolute eyes—may best be understood from one of her letters just a few days before she went to South Hadley in the fall of 1847. A picture this, scarcely to be reproduced:

Mattie Gilbert was here last evening and we sat on the front door steps and talked about life and love and whispered our childish fancies about such blissful things, the evening was gone so soon—and I walked home with Mattie beneath the silent moon and wished for you and heaven. You did not come darling, but a bit of heaven did—or so it seemed to me. As we walked silently side by side and wondered if that great blessedness which may be ours sometime is granted now to some. Those unions, dear Susie, by which two are one, this sweet and strange miracle.

A perfectly normal young heart responding to the natural wondering of impending maturity.

She is perfectly natural, too, in her religious emotions, with all the literal childishness about heaven, reminding her Susie enviously in another letter, that while