the builders, to avert the calamity, kill a lamb or a black cock on the stone, just as at Frankfort they made a cock run across the new-made bridge, DS. no. 185.

I've been to the pisshouse twenty times since yesterday because I'm so nervous.

A strain in Dickinson’s letters and some—though by far a minority—of her poems was a self-diminutization, almost as if to offset and deny—or even disguise—her actual dimensions as she must have experienced them. And this emphasis on her own “littleness,” along with the deliberate strangeness of her tactics of seclusion, have been, until recently, accepted as the prevailing character of the poet […]

Houses, shops, and buildings of all kinds, produce manufactured and unmanufactured, bridges, ships, railway stations and stock of enormous value will have been destroyed.