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‘I think it probable,’ she murmured, recalling (as she put it in her next letter to the Judge), ‘I had never tried any case in your presence but my own, and that, with your sweet assistance . . . Dont you know you have taken my will away . . .? Should I have curbed you sooner? “Spare the ‘Nay’ and spoil the child”? Oh, my too beloved, save me from the idolatry which would crush us both -’.

During 1879 she was following Scribner’s serialisation of The Europeans, a comedy of New England manners by Henry James. What amused her most was the chill rectitude of Mr Wentworth, a replica of Mr Dickinson. ‘I fear I must ask with Mr Wentworth, “Where are our moral foundations?”’ she joked to Mrs Holland, whose husband edited the magazine. The Hollands now lived in New York, out of touch with what had happened to her.

‘Should you ask what had happened here, I should say . . . sweet latent events - too shy to confide -’.

She wasn’t shy when she drafted her letters to Lord: ‘lift me back, wont you, for only there [in your arms] I ask to be . . .’. He was her ‘lovely Salem’; she, his ‘Amherst’. Weekly letters, directed to arrive on Mondays by the Judge’s habits of punctuality, bonded Salem and Amherst. Emily’s ‘little devices to live till Monday’ - attempts to concentrate on work - gave way to ‘the thought of you’. So she said to herself, if not to Salem, in a pencilled scrap which breaks into verse celebrating the nature of love (fleet, indiscreet, wrong and joyful), drawing out a ‘glee’ lurking in Salem’s corners and capable of eluding the scourge of a puritanical religion - shades of her father warning her mother not to look for pleasure in marriage:

How fleet—how indiscreet an one—

How always wrong is Love—

The joyful little Deity

We are not scourged to serve—

Embraces sealed the nearness of words when, now, at more frequent intervals, Salem - ‘sweet Salem’ - came to Amherst. As a single man it was no longer proper for Judge Lord to stay at the Homestead; he and Emily met in the parlour. There, they held each other while the air about them fanned the question of marriage.

It was different from her feelings for ‘Master’. Lord was emotionally more guarded and this blocked the kind of desire she hoped to promote (like her mother before her): ‘How could I long to give who never saw your natures Face -’, she tried to say in a draft of a letter she may not have sent. At the same time his physical presence intensified in August and September of 1880, when he practically lived in Amherst.

During this time they may have entered into some kind of private engagement. Softly, her thin hand is offered to him in response to what she calls ‘your distant hope’. He leaves saying it had been a ‘heavenly hour’. How sweet was his candour, she wrote. It was a new fashion ‘in delight’ to hear a man call her beautiful. ‘I never heard you call anything beautiful before’, she scribbled a day or so after. ‘It remained with me curiously’. By ‘curiously’, she meant a dream where she was asked to ‘unvail’ his posthumous statue. She couldn’t bring herself to unveil him, she confessed: ‘I said what I had not done in Life I would not in death when your loved eyes could not forgive.’ It was important for her to convey that she would not take advantage of this intimacy; he was not to be used as material for poems. This was strictly a private pleasure and part of her pleasure was to release a clarity of statement that reflects a judge’s demand for directness. He would have had a lifetime’s experience in courtroom questioning - pressing for truth - but he had the sensitivity to refrain from power. He might have been a Master, but wasn’t.

Emily Dickinson had led ‘Master’ and Mr Higginson a merry dance, beckoning then giving them the slip - her superior instants furled in riddles they could not read. Her abjection as the humble little Daisy or the worshipful posture of ‘your Scholar’ teased these leaders of the literary marketplace. The Judge, with dynamite in his eye when it came to character, would