Page:The Atlantic Monthly Volume 139.djvu/801

The letters which follow, together with the shy, tentative fragments of verse, were written to my father, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, between the years 1879 and 1882. Dealing as they do with things intimate and precious, as his marriage, the birth and death of a loved child, and later the birth of a child who was 'willing to stay,' they were held back from the collection of Emily Dickinson's letters to Colonel Higginson now in possession of the Boston Public Library. Rereading them after many years, I was struck by their exceeding beauty of thought, and wondered if it were fair to shut such thoughts within the bounds of my own library. As I questioned whether to publish them, I came by chance on this sentence in an earlier letter: 'The name of "child" was a snare to me, and I hesitated, choosing my most rudimentary, and without criterion.'^[1] That decided me, and if one person who has lost a child is helped by the thoughts of this luminous creature, the publishing is justified .

If I can stop one heart from breaking
I shall not live in vain;
If I can ease one life the aching,
Or cool one pain,
Or help one fainting robin
Unto his nest again,
I shall not live in vain.

—Poems, First Series

As was Emily Dickinson's custom, there is in these letters neither date nor name of the person addressed, nor, save once, a signature, other than the customary 'Your Scholar' which she used in signing her letters to Colonel Higginson during a period of over twenty years. Written on small, neat sheets of thin white paper, of uniform size, these letters were punctuated only with dashes, with an occasional fleet comma, as if not to be confined within conventional limits. Her handwriting ran clear and straight as the script of a mediæval missal, and had something of the same quality of the cloister, in its purity, its other-worldliness, its wistfulness. Yet it was fearless, boldly original, a thing of itself and like no other. Ink was not used, but rather the more direct and intimate medium of the lead pencil, her thought seeming to skim along on wings, as if it never touched the paper.

Contrary to the policy followed in the previous publishing of her letters and poems, I have retained her own form precisely, including her habit of capitalization, which was the Old English method of distinguishing every noun substantive. At the risk, by this means, of distracting the mind of the reader from the flowing cadence of her thought, it has seemed keenly interesting and vivid to give to the words the values which she gave them. To change this would be like scratching out the purple and blue and gold with which the capital letters of missals were made beautiful.

The first letter was written on the occasion of Colonel Higginson's marriage,