o Colonel Higginson she talked much about her father -- a man who "read on Sunday lonely and rigorous books"; and so inspired her with awe that she did not learn to tell time until fifteen years old, because he had tried to explain it to her when a little child, and she was afraid to tell him she did not understand; also afraid to ask anyone else lest he should hear of it. He did not wish his children when young to read anything but the Bible. But at least two books early ran the blockade: Kavanagh, brought home by her brother, was hidden under the piano cover; and Lydia Maria Child's Letters from New York, sent by a friend, found refuge in a box beside the doorstep.

After the first book, "Emily," says Higginson, "thought in ecstasy, 'This then is a book and there are more of them'" "When I lost the use of my eyes," she said, "it was a comfort to think that there were so few real books, that I could easily find one to read me all of them." Afterward, when sufficiently restored to read Shakespeare, she thought to herself, "Why is any other book needed?" She had earlier written to Colonel Higginson: "You inquire my books?" For poets, I have Keats and Mr. and Mrs. Browning. For prose, Mr. Ruskin, Sir Thomas Browne and the Revelations. I went to school, but in your manner of the phrase had no education. When a little girl, I had a friend who taught me immortality: but venturing too near, himself, he never returned... My companions: hills, sir, and the sundown, and a dog as large as myself that my father bought me. They are better than beings, because they know, but do not tell."

With this birthright, with this nature, thrust back upon itself -- recoil inevitable -- life to Emily Dickinson was fraught with peril. But she saw the danger signal in her solitary way. Providentially the road forked, and one stood ready to meet her necessity. For the unique service rendered this woman of genius by a man of genius, all who love and admire Emily Dickinson thank Thomas Wentworth Higginson. It is not difficult to see from what he saved her. Mr. Higginson has noted her touch of likeness to William Blake. It seems to me to lie deeper than in any quality of her verse -- to reach down to that delicate mainspring of mind, the more exquisite whose mechanism the more easily jarred. A certain correspondence in their verse is symptomatic of a common peril. In her second letter to Mr. Higginson Miss Dickinson wrote: "I had a terror since September I could tell to none; and, so I sing, as the body does in [by] the burying ground, because I am afraid." Six years later, when her nature was flowering under the sunshine of his appreciation, and the pruning of his criticism, she wrote to him -- her "master": "of our greatest acts we are ignorant. You were not aware that you saved my life. To thank you in person has been since then one of my few requests." This was granted, and in 1870 occurred Higginson's first interview with the poet. She met her own description: "Small like the wren; and my hair is bold, like the chestnut burr; and my eyes like the sherry in the glass that the guest leaves." Another friend has said of her: "She was not beautiful, yet had many beauties" -- a word that suits, too, her intellect. I have not dwelt upon Emily Dickinson's faults; they speak for themselves, and sometimes with such a din that virtues cannot be heard. Granted that her poetry is uneven, so rugged of rhyme and rhythm that it jolts the mind like a corduroy road -- I prefer it to a flowery bed of ease. Many can lull, but few can awake.  #

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