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his church as a consequence of fervent Abolitionist beliefs; a radical in New England reformist circles, he was a staunch supporter of John Brown; in the Civil War he was a colonel who led a contingent of nine hundred ex-slaves in the occupation of the city of Jacksonville, Florida. (Higginson later wrote movingly of this experience in Army Life in a Black Regiment , 1869: “a minor masterpiece” in Brenda Wineapple’s estimation.)
    With astonishing zeal and steadfastness Higginson was an early advocate of women’s suffrage as he was a vociferous advocate of civil rights for Negroes during Reconstruction; he was a quasi-mystical nature-writer, in the mode of his model Henry David Thoreau; his Young Folks’ History of the United States (1875) became a best-seller. Higginson’s first love had been poetry, in which he may have been slightly discouraged by a rejection letter from Emerson at The Dial that in its devastating brevity deserves enshrinement like the pithier aphorisms of Oscar Wilde:
    [Your verses] have truth and earnestness and a happier hour may add that external perfection which can neither be commanded nor described.
    Yet Emily Dickinson seems to have virtually idolized Higginson, having committed to memory much of his published writing in The Atlantic and elsewhere and constantly deferring, or seeming to defer, to his “superior” judgment. As Benfey notes, “she told him, twice, that he had saved her life.” Their famous first meeting in August 1870, at the Dickinson family home in Amherst, Massachusetts, is preserved solely in Higginson’s prose, in a letter to his wife Mary:
    A step like a pattering child’s in entry & in glided a little plain woman with two smooth bands of reddish hair & a face…with no good features—in a very plain & exquisitely clean white pique & a blue worsted shawl. She came to me with two day lilies which she put in a sort of childlike way into my hand & said “These are my introduction” in a soft frightened breathless voice—& added under her breath, Forgive me if I am frightened; I never see strangers & hardly know what I say—but she talked soon & thenceforward continuously—& deferentially—sometimes stopping to ask me to talk instead—but readily recommencing. [ A Summer of Hummingbirds ]
    And, later, somewhat defensively:
    I never was with anyone who drained my nerve power so much…Without touching her, she drew from me. I am glad not to live near her. She often thought me tired.
    Though convinced of Dickinson’s originality and of the possibility of her genius, yet Higginson persists in seeing inher something frankly repugnant; he suspects “an excess of tension…something abnormal” in her.
    Within the loosely constructed space of A Summer of Hummingbirds , the epistolary friendship/romance of the self-styled “scholar” Emily Dickinson and her “master” Higginson is but one thread in an entanglement of erotic yearnings, while in the aptly titled White Heat the primary focus is a tenderly voyeuristic evocation of the literary couple’s relationship, as in these Jamesian elocutions of Wineapple’s:
    Totemic assumptions about Emily Dickinson and Thomas Wentworth Higginson do not for a moment let us suppose that she, proffering flowers and poems, and he, the courtly feminist, very much married, were testing the waters of romance. But about their correspondence is its faint hint or, if not of that, then of a flirtation buoyed by compassion, consideration, and affection…. (Each) of (Dickinson’s) notes bursts with innuendo, attachment, warmth, flattery…. She admired his gravitas. “Your thought is so serious and captivating, that it leaves one stronger and weaker too, the Fine of Delight.” She admired his probity. “That it is true, Master…is the Power of all you write.”
    How crushed Dickinson must have been by