“Find ecstasy in life; the mere sense of living is joy enough.”

Encouraging an attentive delight in existence itself · Letter

• Beauty
• Joy

“My friends are my estate.”

Measuring wealth through friendship rather than possessions · Letter to Thomas Wentworth Higginson, 1870

• Friendship
• Joy

“Morning without you is a dwindled Dawn.”

Expressing how absence alters the experience of ordinary beauty · Letter to Susan Dickinson, 1852

• Love
• Nature

“Unable are the loved to die. For love is immortality.”

Presenting love as a force beyond mortality · Letter to Mrs Henry Holland, 1876

• Love
• Mortality

“That it will never come again is what makes life so sweet.”

Finding sweetness in life’s transience · Letter to Charles H. Clark, 1880

• Joy
• Time