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.