The Story of Wellesley | Page 9

ability,
and before she was seventeen she had become a fine Latin scholar and
had read also all the Odyssey in the original." Her life-long friend,
Ralph Waldo Emerson, writes in praise of her: "The rare
accomplishments and singular loveliness of her character endeared her
to all. . . . She became one of the best Greek scholars in the country,
and continued in her latest years the habit of reading Homer, the
tragedians, and Plato. But her studies took a wide range in mathematics,
natural philosophy, psychology, theology, and ancient and modern

literature. Her keen ear was open to whatever new facts astronomy,
chemistry, or the theories of light and heat had to furnish. Absolutely
without pedantry, she had no desire to shine. She was faithful to all the
duties of wife and mother in a well-ordered and eminently hospitable
household wherein she was dearly loved. She was without appetite for
luxury or display or praise or influence, with entire indifference to
triffles. . . . As she advanced in life her personal beauty, not remarked
in youth, drew the notice of all."
There could have been no nobler, saner influence for an intellectual boy
than the companionship of this unusual woman, and if we are to begin
at the beginning of Wellesley's story, we must begin with Mrs. Ripley,
for Mr. Durant often said that she had great influence in inclining his
mind in later life to the higher education of women.
From Waltham the young man went in 1837 to Harvard, where we hear
of him as "not specially studious, and possessing refined and luxurious
tastes which interfered somewhat with his pursuit of the regular studies
of the college." But evidently he was no ordinary idler, for he haunted
the Harvard Library, and we know that all his life he was a lover of
books. In 1841 he was graduated from Harvard, and went home to
Lowell to read law in his father's office, where Benjamin F. Butler was
at that time a partner. The dilettante attitude which characterized his
college years is now no longer in evidence. He writes to a friend, "I
shall study law for the present to oblige father; he is in some trouble,
and I wish to make him as happy as possible. The future course of my
life is undetermined, except that all shall yield to holy poetry. Indeed it
is a sacred duty. I have begun studying law; don't be afraid, however,
that I intend to give up poetry. I shall always be a worshiper of that
divinity, and l hope in a few years to be able to give up everything and
be a priest in her temple." After a year he writes, "I have not written
any poetry this whole summer. Old Mrs. Themis says that I shall not
visit any more at the Miss Muses. I'll see the old catamaran hanged,
though, but what I will, and I'll write a sonnet to my old shoe directly,
out of mere desperation. Pity and sympathize with me." And on March
28, 1843, we find him writing to a college friend:

"I have been attending courts of all kinds and assisting as junior
counsel in trying cases and all the drudgery of a lawyer's life. One end
of my labor has been happily attained, for about three weeks ago I
arrived at the age of twenty-one, and last week I mustered courage to
stand an examination of my qualifications for an attorney, and the
result (unlike that of some examinations during my college life) was
fortunate, with compliments from the judge. I feel a certain vanity (not
unmixed, by the way, with self-contempt) at my success, for I well
remember l and a dear friend of mine used to mourn over the
impossibility of our ever becoming business men, and lo, I am a
lawyer.-- I have a right to bestow my tediousness on any court of the
Commonwealth, and they are bound to hear me."
From 1843 to 1847 he practiced at the Middlesex Bar, and from 1847,
when he went to live in Boston, until 1863, he was a member of the
Suffolk Bar. On November 25, 1851, he had his name changed by act
of the Legislature. There were eleven other lawyers by the name of
Smith, practicing in Boston, and two of them were Henry Smiths. To
avoid the inevitable confusion, Henry Welles Smith became Henry
Fowle Durant, both Fowle and Durant being family names.
In 1852 Mr. Durant was a member of the Boston City Council, but did
not again hold political office. On May 28, 1854, he married his cousin,
Pauline Adeline Fowle, of Virginia, daughter of the late
Lieutenant-colonel John Fowle of the United States Army and Paulina
Cazenove. On March 2, 1855, the little