Only [Our] Inferences Therefrom!

Dickinson requires two things of her readers: their delight in her work (“her flowers” [J868, Fr908]) and an intelligence in “inferring.” So she suggests in that slantwise admonition to meet her and work with her. Recall that she closed Fascicle 8—the one in which the diction surrounds the idea of power, magic, and transport—with the tale of the “little Arctic flower” that “Went wandering down the Latitudes / Until it puzzled came / To continents of summer—/ to firmaments of sun.” Should she return,¹ she would be astonished at the reach of those latitudes in which she