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
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