Emily Dickinson enjoyed socializing with friends like Samuel Bowles and his wife, Mary, in The Evergreens parlor. She wrote to him in 1858, “Though it is almost nine o’clock, the skies are gay and yellow, and there’s a purple craft or so, in which a friend could sail. Tonight looks like ‘Jerusalem.’ I think Jerusalem must be like Sue’s Drawing Room, when we are talking and laughing there, and you and Mrs Bowles are by.”
Emily Dickinson to Mr. & Mrs. Samuel Bowles (L189), about June 1858, in The Letters of Emily Dickinson, ed. Thomas H. Johnson (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1958), 2:334.
