The Activist and the Recluse

Ralph Waldo Emerson once wrote that each new acquaintance was potentially “an ambassador of the infinite.” For one of the Sage of Concord’s most fervent admirers, the now-forgotten reformer and man of letters Thomas Wentworth Higginson (1823-1911), the phrase proved surprisingly apt. On April 17, 1862, he received a mysterious unsigned letter in an almost illegible hand; into the envelope had been tucked four poems, along with yet another smaller, sealed envelope. Inside that he found a card on which the unknown sender had scribbled her name in pencil: Emily Dickinson. One of the poems began, “I’ll tell you how the Sun rose/A Ribbon at a time …” During the next 25 years, in letters at once riddling and coquettish — as well as in the more than 100 poems she would send the baffled but admiring Higginson — Dickinson too revealed herself “a ribbon at a time.”