"The cornice but a mound...."See in text(Text of the Poem)
In Dickinson’s original draft of the poem, this line reads as “The Cornice — in the Ground —,” which is an altogether different image. A cornice is a concave feature below a roof or ceiling. The image of a cornice constituting a mound makes little sense. The cornice in ground, however, conveys the notion of a house buried deep in the ground, presumably due to the passage of time. This is a case in which Loomis Todd and Higginson’s edits are notably damaging to the original intention of the poem.
