Emerson’s biographical sketch of Ezra Ripley, D. D. appears to be a eulogy but I’m not certain when it was actually delivered as there is not annotation in the version of the essay I read.

Ripley (1751 – 1841) was the fifth of nineteen children. His father, Noah Ripley, was a farmer and wished Ripley to become a grammar school teacher but couldn’t send him to college. So Noah made a deal with Reverend Dr. Forbes. When Ezra was sixteen he went to work for Forbes for five years. After those five years Forbes sent Ezra to college.

As is so often the case, the young do not want to pursue the career their parents desire of them. Ripley didn’t much like teaching. He wanted to be a preacher. With the assistance of Dr. Forbes he entered Harvard in July of 1772. The American Revolutionary War sort of got in the way a bit, but he managed to graduate in the class of 1776. Ripley was ordained minister of Concord in 1778.

In 1780 Ripley married Phoebe Bliss Emerson, Ralph Waldo’s grandmother. She was thirty-nine and a widow with five children (one of them Emerson’s father) but managed to have three more children with Ripley.

Emerson wasn’t born until 1803 so never knew his biological grandfather. He and Ripley seem to have been fond of each other. Emerson recalls,

I can remember a little speech he made to me, when the last tie of blood which held me and my brothers to his house was broken by the death of his daughter. He said, on parting, ” I wish you and your brothers to come to this house as you have always done. You will not like to be excluded ; I shall not like to be neglected.”

Ripley identified with, as Emerson describes it, ” the ideas and forms of the New England Church, which expired about the same time with him, so that he and his coevals seemed the rear guard of the great camp and army of the Puritans.”

He was a sincere, punctual and severe man. Emerson tells of him

I remember, when a boy, driving about Concord with him, and in passing each house he told the story of the family that lived in it, and especially he gave me anecdotes of the nine church members who had made a division in the church in the time of his predecessor, and showed me how every one of the nine had come to bad fortune or to a bad end.

Don’t you wish that Emerson would elaborate on this story? I want to know what the bad ends were. But Ripley wasn’t mean, he was also charitable and generous and hospitable. His house was always open to anyone.

He was also very credulous. And because he was not a reader and read nothing other than his weekly religious newspaper and the tracts of his sect, he was an easy dupe for charlatans and fell for phrenology and magnetism and nearly anything else that seemed plausible.

Ripley spoke to the point and did not waste words which may account for his fame as a person who could say

difficult and unspeakable things; in delivering to a man or a woman that which all their other friends had abstained from saying, in uncovering the bandage from a sore place, and applying the surgeon’s knife with a truly surgical spirit.

I can see how he would be a valuable person to have around. He’d tell you right out if you were about to make a big mistake, no wishy-washy and vague murmurs of “support” that friends might give in order to spare your feelings.

The funniest thing Emerson says about him is this:

His partiality for ladies was always strong, and was by no means abated by time. He claimed privilege of years, was much addicted to kissing ; spared neither maid, wife, nor widow, and, as a lady thus favored remarked to me, ” seemed as if he was going to make a meal of you.”

This leads me to believe that however severe and righteous he may have been in his religion, he was a real character. How I wish I could have been a fly on the wall at Emerson family gatherings! Or at the very least, I wish Emerson would gossip once in awhile. But I have yet to catch him stooping to such a thing.

Next week’s Emerson: Chardon Street Convention