Page:The Life and Letters of Emily Dickinson (1924).pdf/63

Rh in for tea. In mid-winter there were usually six weeks of protracted meetings. The picture deepens while one reads on:

As the snow lay two or three feet deep on the level those wintry days, Amherst with no street lights, no trolleys, no railroads, telephone and movie undreamed of, seemed to my perverse young mind, animal spirits and vigorous happiness, a staring, lonely, hopeless place,—enough to make angels homesick. The lugubrious sound of the church bell still rings in my winter dreams.

Emily always declared she was sure the Baptist bell would ring in the Day of Judgment, and more and more she turned to the warmth of her home within, and the little conservatory where her ferns and yellow jasmine and purple heliotrope made an atmosphere more tropical for the dwelling of her imagination. The scent of her cape jasmines and daphne odora is forever immortalized to those who breathed it, transporting them back to the loveliness of her immortal atmosphere.

The Tyler home was another one distinguished for unstinted hospitality. The stranger, the foreigner, rich and poor were welcomed there; missionaries, statesmen, scholars, and when Charles Sumner was in Amherst he found with them the only welcome afforded an abolitionist—for the aristocratic salvation of the Nation, as it was then held, lay in the choice of the old Whig Party. How slowly they yielded, those handsome stubborn gentlemen in velvet collars and beaver hats, to the emancipating chariots of the God of battle and Abraham Lincoln!

But even in these repressed lives stolen pleasures were sweet, and it is a relief to be told that

Emily Fowler had what she called P.O.M. meetings at her house, impromptu dances,—if our floundering attempts to get