<P> Though the great Waters sleep, That they are still the Deep, We cannot doubt--No vacillating God Ignited this Abode To put it out--</P> <P> Emily Dickinson, c. 1884 </P> <P> Otis Phillips Lord, an elderly judge on the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court from Salem, in 1872 or 1873 became an acquaintance of Dickinson's . After the death of Lord's wife in 1877, his friendship with Dickinson probably became a late - life romance, though as their letters were destroyed, this is surmised . Dickinson found a kindred soul in Lord, especially in terms of shared literary interests; the few letters which survived contain multiple quotations of Shakespeare's work, including the plays Othello, Antony and Cleopatra, Hamlet and King Lear . In 1880 he gave her Cowden Clarke's Complete Concordance to Shakespeare (1877). Dickinson wrote that "While others go to Church, I go to mine, for are you not my Church, and have we not a Hymn that no one knows but us?" She referred to him as "My lovely Salem" and they wrote to each other religiously every Sunday . Dickinson looked forward to this day greatly; a surviving fragment of a letter written by her states that "Tuesday is a deeply depressed Day". </P> <P> After being critically ill for several years, Judge Lord died in March 1884 . Dickinson referred to him as "our latest Lost". Two years before this, on April 1, 1882, Dickinson's "Shepherd from' Little Girl'hood", Charles Wadsworth, also had died after a long illness . </P>

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