With her singular simplicity and purity, such as society could not spoil, nor much affect, she was only entertained by it, and really went into it as children into a theatre,--to be diverted,--while her ready sympathy enjoyed whatever beauty of person, manners, or ornament it had to show.

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.

The words enclosed in brackets are those which are on her gravestone." "Si quis piorum manibus locus; si, ut sapientibus placet, non cum corpore exstinguunter magnae animae; (placide quescas, nosque, domum tuam, ab tuarum voces, quas neque lugeri neque plangi fas est: admiratione te potius, temporalibus laudibus, et, si natura suppedit, similitudine decoremus.) Is verus honos, ea conjunctissimi cujusque pietas.