A 820: etext transcription

This is one of a number of late manuscripts in which the opposite sides of the paper constitute separate textual spaces. A 820a carries the remains of an abandoned, and now partly illegible, message-draft. It may be the draft of a letter to George Montague, the fair-copy of which contains one or two similar phrases (see J L 703) to those in the fragment. The text inscribed on A 820, by itself a single, exquisite line of prose or verse, appears as a trace in three fair-copy drafts of Dickinson's final letter to Helen Hunt Jackson—A 817; A 818; A 819—composed in March 1885 (THJ, RWF), but never mailed. Dickinson's final intentions toward this fragment remain unknown. It may be an early draft of the passage in the letter to Hunt Jackson or an autonomous pensée composed independently of the letter and incorporated in it because of its momentary aptness.