Emily Jane Bronte died of consumption when she was only thirty. The calendar called it Tuesday, the 19th of December, 1848 … birth of the Festival of Winter. On Monday the 18th, Charlotte had read to her from Emerson’s essays “… I read on until I found she was not listening.”
—
Quoted in Susan Howe: My Emily Dickinson
Before he was executed for leading the attack on Harper’s Ferry, John Brown handed a last note to one of his jailers:
Charlestown, Va., Dec. 2, 1859
I, John Brown, am now quite certain that the crimes of this guilty land will never be purged away but with blood. I had, as I now think vainly, flattered myself that without very much bloodshed it might be done.
—-
quoted in Susan Howe: My Emily Dickinson
To see the Summer Sky
Is Poetry, though never in a Book it lie -
True Poems flee -
Emily Dickinson (1879)
Useless liquidation customers shopping for useless discounted materials in a useless Borders move past useless soaring thoughts that make you uselessly think about the utility of useless Ralph Waldo Emerson or useless Henry David Thoreau in today’s society; or
