If there was conversation, if there were
thought or learning, her interest was commanded, and she gave
herself up to the happiness of the hour.
"As she advanced in life, her personal beauty, not remarked
in her youth, drew the notice of all, and age brought no fault
but the brief decay and eclipse of her intellectual powers."
In 1833, three years before Emerson wrote "Nature," Mrs. Ripley
said of him: "We regard him still, more than ever, as the
apostle of the Eternal Reason. We do not like to hear the
crows, as Pindar says, caw at the bird of Jove."*
[Footnote]
* On the stone which marks Mrs. Ripley's grave in the beautiful
cemetery at Concord, her children placed an inscription containing
a part of the passage with which Tacitus ends his Life of Agricola.
"It was a passage which was specially dear to her," says her
biographer; "many of her friends will recall the fine glow of
feeling with which she read or quoted it; and to these it will
always be associated with her memory. I cannot better close this
imperfect sketch of her life than by giving the whole of it: of
no one was it ever more worthily spoken than of her.
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