Emily Dickinson wrote over poems with scientific themes. Chemistry was an extremely popular science in the nineteenth century. Mary Lyon, the founder of Mount Holyoke Female Seminary, which Emily attended in 1848, had a particular interest in chemistry and the sciences in general. Lyon was close friends with the Hitchcocks, and Edward Hitchcock and other Amherst College professors frequently taught or lectured at Mount Holyoke. Thus, the young Emily had learned the principle of the Conservation of Energy: that energy is never destroyed.
The Chemical conviction
That Nought be lost
Enable in Disaster
My fractured Trust—
The Faces of the Atoms
If I shall see
How more the Finished Creatures
Departed me!