Emma Lazarus is best known for the lines from her sonnet “The New Colossus” (1883) —“Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free”—immortalized on the Statue of Liberty. In 1876, when she was invited to the Emersons’ Concord home, she was an emerging poet whom Ralph Waldo Emerson had taken an interest in. Lazarus came to stay with the Emerson family for a week, arriving on August 25th— one hundred and fifty years ago today.

A virtual peek at early-summer blooms in the garden of the Emerson House in Concord, Massachusetts.