Writings by Susan Dickinson: Society at Amherst Fifty Years Ago

chapel -- They were exquisite subtle -- most poetical
but rather over the heads of sweet sixteen and college
boys, but these with all our lectures were always given
in the evening affording a delightful romantic sort[?]
of a time as we were invited by our gentlemen friends
and as then the mode strolled slowly under their escort
up the long hill and more slowly under the stars after the
lecture was over back to our homes --

Prof. Tyler
(Hospitality) There are not many living in the village
now of who remember the unstinted hospitality of
the Tyler home -- home, indeed it was for the stranger the
foreigner, rich, and poor, servants -- missionaries statesmen &
scholars -- How with six and eight-hundred a year and an
expensive family, the door could be always open and
the welcome spread is a modern marvel -- When Sumner
was in Amherst he found there the only political
welcome the village there afforded an abolitionist
The aristocratic tone and salvation of our nation then
as held by them lay in the voices of the old Whig
party who so long and stubbornly resisted any stirring
of the slavery cause as disloyalty to the Constitution
and a menace to national safety -- How slowly they
yielded those handsome stubborn gentlemen in velvet
collars and beaver hats to the emancipating chariots
of the God of faith and Abram Lincoln. -- Prof. Tyler
in those days believed in the best and worst of

H bMS Am 1118.95, Box 9


	Image reproduced by permission of the Houghton Library, Harvard University. Not to be reproduced in whole or in part without permission. Transcription and commentary copyright 1998 by Martha Nell Smith, Laura Elyn Lauth, and Lara Vetter, all rights reserved Maintained by Rebecca Mooney <rnmooney@umd.edu> Last updated on January 25, 2008