Emma Lazarus’s Visit to the Emerson House
Emma Lazarus is best known for the line: “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free…” from her sonnet “The New Colossus” (1883), honoring the Statue of Liberty. Emma Lazarus c.1872, T. Johnson and W. Kurtz, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.
On August 25, 1876, the poet Emma Lazarus arrived at the Emersons’ house in Concord, Massachusetts. Emerson picked her up at the train depot in a single-horse-drawn wagon. After turning down an invitation to New York City, Ralph Waldo Emerson had asked Lazarus to instead come stay with his family at the end of August. He had first been introduced to Lazarus and her work about ten years prior. One of her first published poems was dedicated to Emerson. He had long taken an interest in emerging American poets and writers, and exchanged letters with Lazarus, offering her both encouragement and criticism. She had yet to write the line that would be immortalized on the Statue of Liberty.
The next morning, twenty-seven-year-old Lazarus sat patiently on the front steps, waiting for an opportunity to visit with her famous host, and was disappointed to learn that he would spend the morning in his study. Ellen took Lazarus out sightseeing to “the cliffs” near Walden Pond, but the poetess returned eager to spend time with Emerson in the afternoon. Ellen, guarding her father’s solitude, informed her that Emerson would stay behind closed doors in his study all afternoon, until he went walking, presumably alone. The seventy-three-year-old philosopher was struggling with aphasia, and disinclined to company that required him to be conversant, but he was able to enjoy reading. Lazarus had mistaken herself to be Emerson’s personal guest, not realizing he intended her to visit with his eldest daughter, Ellen. Ellen’s brother Edward was later amused by his sister’s relentlessness in dashing Lazarus’s hopes. According to Ellen, Lazarus “bore” her letdown “nobly.”
The two women were somewhat surprised in their expectations of one another. Ellen was surprised by Lazarus’s age—which she had supposed to be closer to her own, at thirty-seven years— her physical stature, and her forthright demeanor, but she retained “a little romance”—a sense of wonder and mystery—in her impression of Lazarus. She described their guest to her sister Edith: “She is very pleasant and has plain natural manners so I expect a cheerful time, and she! of course is at the very summit of delight & joyful anticipation” (ETE Letters, 223). Ellen reported “her youth and happiness were elixir to us all.” For her part, Lazarus thought Ellen a “faithful” daughter; she seemed “always to stand by the side of her august father” (qtd in Poems). Lazarus confided to Ellen that, judging from her letters, she had anticipated she would be “severe” (ETE 224-225).
This impression was no doubt reinforced by Lazarus’s experience the night she arrived. Ellen kept a strict routine, and was protective of her father’s rest. She expected the household—guests included—to retire to their rooms promptly at 8 p.m. Lazarus resisted her hostess’s punctilious schedule. Ellen allowed an extra fifteen minutes before calling her mother, Lidian, and their visitor to bed from the top of the stairs. Still Lazarus demurred, asking Lidian if she might sit up with Emerson, if he was not yet going to bed. (Apparently, he was permitted to keep his own hours). She stayed up with the Concord Sage for an hour and a half past his customary quiet time. The next morning, Emerson conceded, in Ellen’s words, that “he was alarmed at first” by the prospect of entertaining their guest in conversation alone, “but very glad afterwards to have that time to talk” with Lazarus (224).
Ellen was interested in their conversations on Christianity and Judaism, as Lazarus shared experiences and perspectives that Ellen had never had the opportunity to be exposed to before. She also delighted in observing Lazarus’s interactions with her parents, reporting to her sister that their mother “walked right into every dangerous subject.” Lidian’s social blunders “made” Ellen “dance with amusement” (223). Although Ellen does not detail the conversation topics, Lazarus’s “ardent persistent questions” and Lidian’s “utterly unexpected answers” made for an entertaining exchange. Ellen told her sister that Lazarus “got at many a corner of Mother’s mind never before visited.” And when Lidian inadvertently misled the conversation into precarious territory, “walking right into and onto all Emma’s supposed feelings and opinions,” Lazarus responded with “pretty frankness” (225).
Her interactions with Emerson, too, were “a novel spectacle” to Ellen, who reported that Lazarus’s direct questions “astonished him.” But he hid it gracefully from Lazarus, who did not know him as well as his daughter. Ellen remarked that Lazarus “didn’t see how much” he was discomfited. Ellen continued, “and she got answers out of him I should have declared he wouldn’t give” (225). Lazarus later recalled that Emerson’s “benevolent” expression “set the shyest at their ease.” She was impressed by “his courtesy, gentleness, simplicity, and boundless hospitality” (“Emerson’s Personality”).
— K.L. Martin, PhD, Emerson House guide
WORKS CITED OR CONSULTED:
Gregg, Edith E.W. The Letters of Ellen Tucker Emerson, Volume Two. (The Kent Sate University Press, 1982), 220, 223-225.
Lazarus, Emma. “Emerson’s Personality,” Jewish Women's Archive, <https://jwa.org/media/emersons-personality-0> (Accessed August 22, 2026).
Lazarus, Emma. The Poems of Emma Lazarus, Volume 2, Project Gutenburg, https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/3473/pg3473-images.html (Accessed August 22, 2026).
