I n 1890, four years after Emily Dickinson's death, Roberts Brothers issued Poems, the first collection of her work, edited by Thomas Wentworth Higginson and Mabel Loomis Todd. The book was an immediate, surprising success, and not long after, composers began setting her poems to music. Carlton Lowenberg's 1992 Musicians Wrestle Everywhere identifies 1896 as the earliest date for a Dickinson poem to be set to music and issued in print, Etta (or Willetta) Parker's "Have You Got a Brook in Your Little Heart?" Lowenberg says little of Parker's musical setting beyond, "Emily Dickinson's words were used by permission of Lavinia Dickinson, her sister" (80). Scored for voice and piano, the song was published in Boston by C.W. Thompson, and again the same year, by Miles and Thompson (these seem to be the same company), as one of a set of Three Songs by Parker. Parker was performing the song by December 1894, more than a year earlier than its 1896 publication date. She was an 1884 graduate of the New England Conservatory of Music and a working musician and composer, albeit one who, it seems, never achieved a fully fledged professional musical career. Also in 1894, a German composer long resident in England named Jacques (or Jacob) Blumenthal published a two-volume set called Two Books of Song, which contains musical settings of two Dickinson poems, "My river runs to thee-" (Fr219) (the song was titled "My River,") and "I hide myself within my flower" (Fr80) (called "With a Flower"), which are not listed in Musicians Wrestle Everywhere.