A 760: etext transcription

This is one of a number of late manuscripts in which opposite sides constitute separate textual spaces. The fair-copy text on A 760 appears to be an excerpt from a letter (unknown number of leaves missing). Millicent Todd Bingham associated the text with Dickinson's correspondence with Judge Otis P. Lord; no complete fair-copy of the letter to Lord, however, has survived, and the provenance of the text is not known. Dickinson drew five diagonal lines through the face of the fair-copy draft, canceling it before using the other side of the paper to compose the rough-copy fragment. The extrageneric rough-copy text on A 760a may be a passage destined for incorporation into a letter, notes toward a poem, or an autonomous pensée. The document was torn after Dickinson composed the fair-copy draft, but probably before she composed the rough-copy text, which is fitted into the space of the paper. The author of the tears has not been positively identified; they may be the work of a censor or, as seems more likely under the circumstances, of Dickinson herself. Dickinson revised the rough-copy fragment both during the initial drive of composition, when she jotted down and then canceled the variant "how" for "it is," and again after completing a preliminary draft, when she probably composed yet another variant, "discover that it is," for the same phrase; the second variant is composed sideways along the left edge of the paper.