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place, enough to make angels homesick. The lugubrious sound of the church bell X
still rings in my Winter dreams. Emily Dickinson, when a girl, used to say it
reverberated to her solely of the judgment day!
There are not many now living in the village who remember the unstinted hospitality
of the Tyler home. Home indeed it was for the stranger, the foreigner, rich and
poor, Savants, Missionaries, Statesmen and Scholars. How, with the usual stipend
of six or eight hundred a year, and an expensive growing family, the door could
be always open and the welcome spread, is a modern marvel. Mrs Tyler, over-bur
dened with cares domestic, social and public, always kept a free mind mind [sic] for
all written thought as well; whether of memoir, history or fiction. When a cer-
tain other dear woman among us was refusing to read Adam Bede, at the time of its pub-
lication, on the score of the author's ungodliness, -- Mrs Tyler was reading it
aloud to her husband and both were filled with its charm and moral power. X
Indeed they were for a long time the only persons in the village who knew any-
thing of George Eliot or her work.
When Sumner was in Amherst, he found with them the only welcome the village
afforded an abolitionist. The aristocratic tone and salvation of our nation, as
then held, lay in the voice of the old Whit party, who so long and so obstinately
resisted any stirring of the slavery cause as disloyalty to the constitution,
and a menace to the national safety. How slowly they yielded, -- those handsome
stubborn gentlemen in velvet collars and stiff beaver hats, -- to the emancipating
chariots of the God of battle and Abraham Lincoln!
Professor Tyler, in these days, believed in the best and worst of human nature;
which furnished him with the double equipment of genial sympathy and the re-
lentlessness of a two-edged sword in his eloquent denunciation of sin and the
sinner. There must be some few living, who like myself recall his famous sermon
preached from the text, "When will the Sabbath be gone, that we may sell
corn?" In which he took the opportunity to lash the students for all their
