The Story of Wellesley | Page 8

he was perplexed to know where to put them, but he
thought they might stay under the staircase leading up from the center.
And students and teachers, puzzled by this inhospitality but suspecting
a joke somewhere, came out into the center to find the great cast of
Niobe and her daughter under the stairway at the left, where it stayed
through all the years that followed, until College Hall burned down.
They tell also of the moral he pointed at the unveiling of "The Reading
Girl", by John Adams Jackson, which stood for many years in the
Browning Room. She was reading no light reading, said Mr. Durant, as
the twelve men who brought her in could testify. "She is reading Greek,
and observe--she doesn't wear bangs." They saw him ardent in

friendship as in all else. His devoted friend, and Wellesley's, Professor
Eben N. Horsford, has given us a picture of him which it would be a
pity to miss. The two men are standing on the oak-crowned hill,
overlooking the lake. "We wandered on," says Professor Horsford,
"over the hill and future site of Norumbega, till we came where now
stands the monument to the munificence of Valeria Stone. There in the
shadow of the evergreens we lay down on the carpet of pine foliage and
talked,--I remember it well,--talked long of the problems of life, of
things worth living for; of the hidden ways of Providence as well as of
the subtle ways of men; of the few who rule and are not always
recognized; of the many who are led and are not always conscious of it;
of the survival of the fittest in the battle of life, and of the constant
presence of the Infinite Pity; of the difficulties, the resolution, the
struggle, the conquest that make up the history of every worthy
achievement. I arose with the feeling that I had been taken into the
confidence of one of the most gifted of all the men it had been my
privilege to know. We had not talked of friendship; we had been
unconsciously sowing its seed. He loved to illustrate its strength and its
steadfastness to me; l have lived to appreciate and reverence the
grandeur of the work which he accomplished here."
III.
If we set them over against each other, the hearsay that besmirches and
the reminiscence that canonizes, we evoke a very human, living
personality: a man of keen intellect, of ardent and emotional
temperament, autocratic, fanatical, fastidious, and beauty-loving; a
loyal friend; an unpleasant enemy. "He saw black black and white
white, for him there was no gray." He was impatient of mediocrity. "He
could not suffer fools gladly."
No archangel this, but unquestionably a man of genius, consecrated to
the fulfillment of a great vision. It is no wonder that the early graduates
living in the very presence of his high purpose, his pure intention, his
spendthrift selflessness, remember these things best when they recall
old days. After all, these are the things most worth remembering.
The best and most carefully balanced study of him which we have is by

Miss Charlotte Howard Conant of the class of '84, in an address
delivered by her in the College Chapel, February 18, 1906, to
commemorate Mr. Durant's birthday. Miss Conant's use of the
biographical material available, and her careful and restrained estimate
of Mr. Durant's character cannot be bettered, and it is a temptation to
incorporate her entire pamphlet in this chapter, but we shall have to
content ourselves with cogent extracts.
Henry Fowle Durant, or Henry Welles Smith as he was called in his
boyhood, was born February 20, 1822, in Hanover, New Hampshire.
His father, William Smith, "was a lawyer of limited means, but
versatile mind and genial disposition." His mother, Harriet Fowle
Smith of Watertown, Massachusetts, was one of five sisters renowned
for their beauty and amiability; she was, we are told, intelligent as well
as beautiful, "a great reader, and a devoted Christian all her long life."
Young Henry went to school in Hanover, and in Peacham, Vermont,
but in his early boyhood the family moved to Lowell, Massachusetts,
and from there he was sent to the private school of Mr. and Mrs.
Samuel Ripley in Waltham, to complete his preparation for Harvard.
Miss Conant writes: "Mr. Ripley was pastor of the Unitarian Church
there (in Waltham) from 1809 to 1846, and during most of that time
supplemented the small salary of a country minister by receiving
twelve or fourteen boys into his family to fit for college. From time to
time youths rusticated from Harvard were also sent there to keep up
college work."
"Mrs. Ripley was one of the most remarkable women of her generation.
Born in 1793, she very early began to show unusual intellectual