“Sometimes I take out your letters and verses, dear friend, and when I feel their strange power, it is not strange that I find it hard to write. 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 until then you only enshroud yourself in this fiery mist & I cannot reach you.”- Thomas Wentworth Higginson to Emily Dickinson, 1869
Dickinson’s friend and mentor, the nationally influential political and literary figure Thomas Wentworth Higginson, was as struck by the poet’s personality as with her writing. When he did finally meet her, he reported: “I never was with any one who drained my nerve power so much. Without touching her, she drew from me. I am glad not to live near her.”(L342b)
T. W. Higginson to Emily Dickinson(L330A), June 1869, in The Letters of Emily Dickinson, ed. Thomas H. Johnson (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1958), 2:460.
Thomas Wentworth Higginson to Mary Channing Higginson (L342b), August 1870 in The Letters of Emily Dickinson, ed. Thomas H. Johnson (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1958), 2:474.
