NYPL (Berg Collection): etext transcription

This letter was sent to Benjamin Kimball in 1885 (THJ). The poem "Though the | great Waters | sleep, | That they are | still the Deep, | We cannot | doubt. | No vacillating | God | Ignited this | Abode | To put it out," also composed on stationery embossed Pure Irish Linen F. H. D. & Co. and impressed with a crown, may have been enclosed with it, or with another of Dickinson's letters to Benjamin Kimball; both letters and the poem, along with an envelope addressed by Dickinson, in brown ink, to "Benjamin Kimball. | 8 Congress St - | Boston - | Mass -" are filed together in the New York Public Library (Berg Collection). One passage in this letter reappears, altered, in two drafts of Dickinson's last letter to Helen Hunt Jackson, both composed around March 1885 (THJ, RWF); see A 817 and A 819. For related fragments, see also A 821 and A 822. These fragments may be drafts for passages in the letter, or, as seems more likely, autonomous texts, incorporated into this letter because of their momentary aptness.