Sept. 21. Dr. Ripley died this morning. The fall of
this oak of ninety years makes some sensation in the forest old & doomed as
it was. He has identified himself with the forms at least of the old church of
the New England Puritans; his nature was eminently loyal, not in the least
adventurous or democratical & his whole being leaned backward on the
departed so that he seemed one of the rearguard of this great camp & army
which have filled the world with fame & with him passes out of sight almost
the last banner & guide’s flag of a mighty epoch. For these men however in
our last days they have declined into ritualists, solemnized the heyday of
their strength by the planting & liberating of America.
Great, grim, earnest men I belong by natural affinity to other thoughts &
schools than yours but my affection hovers respectfully about your retiring
footprints, your unpainted churches, street platforms & sad offices, the iron-gray deacon & the
wearisome prayer rich with the diction of ages. Well the new is only the seed
of the old. What is this abolition & non-resistance & temperance but the
continuation of Puritanism tho’ it operate inevitably the destruction of the
church in which it grew, as the new is always making the old superfluous.
Dr. R was a gentleman, no dandy: courtly, hospitable, manly, public spirited:
his nature social, his house open to all men. Mr. R. H., I remember, said ‘No horse
from the eastern country would go by his gate.’ His brow serene & open for
he had no studies, no occupations which company could interrupt. To see his
friends unloosed his tongue & talents: they were his study. His talk was
chiefly narrative: a man of anecdote he told his stories admirably well. Indeed
all his speech was form &pertinence itself. There was no architect of
sentences who built them so well. In private discourse or in debate of the more
public kind the structure of his speech was perfect, so neat, so natural, so
terse, no superfluous clause, his words fell like stones & commonly tho’
quite unconscious of it his speech was a satire on the loose, voluminous,
draggletail periods of other speakers. He sat own when he was done. A foresight
he had when he opened his mouth of all that he would say & and he marched
straight to the conclusion. E. B. E. used to say that ‘a man who could tell a story
so well was company for kings & John Quincy Adams.’
His knowledge was an external experience, an Indian wisdom, the observation of
such facts as country life for nearly a hundred years could supply. He
sympathized with the cow, the horse, the sheep, & the dog whose habits he
had watched for so long & so
friendly. For those who do not separate poetry blend it with things. His eye was
always on the horizon & he knew the
weather like a sea captain. All the plain facts of humanity, - birth, marriage,
sickness, death, the common temptations, the common ambitions, - he knew them
all & sympathized so well that as long as the fact was quite low &
external he was very good company & counsel, but he never divined, never
speculated, & you might as well ask his hill to understand or sympathize
with an extraordinary state of mind, an enthusiasm or an Idea as ask him. What
he did not, he affected not to do. There was no nonsense about him. He was
always sincere, & true to his mark & his mark was never remote. But his
conversation was always strictly personal & and apt to the party & the
occasion. An eminent skill he had in saying difficult & unspeakable things,
saying to a man or woman that which all his other friends abstained from
saying, uncovering the bandages from the sore place & applying the surgeon’s
knife with a truly surgical skill. Was a man a sot or too long a bachelor, or
suspected of some secret crime or had quarreled with his wife or collared his
father or was there any cloud or suspicious
circumstance in his behavior the doctor leaped on the quarry like a hunter on his
game. He thought himself entitled to an explanation & whatever relief to one
or both parties plain speech could effect that was procured. Right manly he was
& the manly thing he could always say.
When Put. Meriam that graduate of the State Prison had the effrontery to call
within the last year on the Doctor as an old acquaintance, in the midst of
general conversation Mr. Frost came in & and the Doctor presently said, ‘Mr.
Meriam, here is my brother and colleague Mr. Frost, has come to take tea with
me. I regret very much the causes you know very well, that make it impossible
for me to ask you to stay & take bread with us.” For the man had for years
been setting at defiance every thing which the Doctor esteemed social &
sacred . Another man might easily have taken another view of his duty but with
the doctor’s views it was a matter of religion to say as much. I like very well
his speech to Charles M. at the funeral of his father. Mr. M. was supposed to
be in bad habits when his father died. ‘Sir, I console with you; Madam I
condole with you; Sir, I knew your great grandfather. When I came to this town,
your great grandfather was a substantial farmer in this very place & an excellent
citizen. Your grandfather followed him & was a virtuous man. Now your father
has gone to his grave full of labors & virtues. There is none of that large
family left, but you, and it rests with you to bear up the good name &
usefulness of your ancestors. If you
fail –Ichabod – the glory is departed. - &c. &c.
He was the more competent to these searching discourses from his long family
knowledge. He knew everybody’s grandfather. This day has perished more history,
more local & personal anecdote for this village & vicinity than in any
ten men who have died in it before. He was the patriarch of all the tribe and his
manners had a natural dignity that comported with his office. The same skill of
speech made him incomparable in his parochial visits ad in his exhortations
& prayers with the sick & mourners. He gave himself up to his feeling &
and said the best things in the world much like Protogenes throwing the brush
in the dog’s mouth he had been painting.** Many & many a felicity he had in
his prayer now forever lost which eclipsed all the rules of all the rhetoricians.
He did not know when he was good in prayer or sermon, for he had no literature
& no art. But he believed & therefore spoke. He was sincere in his
attachments to forms & he was the genuine fruit of a ritual church. The
incarnation of the platform of the Puritan Church. A modern Israelite, a
believer in the Genius of Jehovah of the Jews to the very letter. His prayers
for rain & against lightning, ‘that it may not lick our spirits,’ & for
good weather & against ‘these violent sudden changes’ and against sickness
& insanity & the like, all will remember.
I remember his pleading almost reproachful looks at the sky when the thunder-gust
was coming to spoil his hay – ‘We are in the Lord’s hands,’ he said & and
seemed to say ‘You know me: this field is mine, Dr. Ripley’s thine own servant.’
He was a punctual fulfiller of all
duties. What order! What prudence! No waste & no stint. Always open handed;
just & generous. My little boy a week ago carried him a peach in a calabash
but the calabash brought home two pears. I carried him melons in a basket but
the basket came him with apples. He subscribed to all charities; he was the
most public spirited person in this town; and he gave the land for the
monument. He knew the value of a dollar as well as another man. Yet he always
sold cheaper than any other man. If the fire bell rang he was on horseback in a
minute & away with his bucket and bag.
Wo that the linden & vine should bloom
And a just man be gathered to the tomb.
But out of his own ground he was not good for aught. To talk with the insane he
was mad as they; to speculate with the thoughtful & and the haters of form he
was lost & foolish. He was credulous & the dupe of Colonizationist or
Antipapist or any charlatan of iron combs or tractors or phrenology of magnetism
who went by. Credulous & opinionative, a great brow beater of the poor old
fathers who still survived from the Nineteenth of April in order to make them
testify to his history as he had written
it. A man of no enthusiasm, no sentiment. His horror at the doctrine of non-resistance
was amusing, for he actually believed that once abrogate the laws, promiscuous
union of the sexes would instantly take place!
He was a very easy man to read, for his whole life
& conversation was consistent and transparent: all his opinions & actions
might certainly be predicted by any one who had good opportunities of seeing him.
In college, F King told me from Governor Gore who was the Doctor’s classmate, he
was called ‘Holy Ripley,’ perhaps in derision, perhaps in sadness. And now in
his old age when all the antique Hebraism & customs are going to pieces it
is fit he too should depart, most fit that in the fall of laws a loyal man
should die.
Shall I not say in general, of him, that, given his constitution, his life was
harmonious & perfect.
His body is a handsome & noble spectacle. My mother was moved just now to
call it ‘the beauty of the dead.’ He looks like a sachem fallen in the forest,
or rather like ‘a warrior taking his rest with his martial cloak around him.” I
carried Waldo to see him & and he testified neither repulsion nor surprise,
but only the quiet curiosity. He was ninety years old the last May, yet his
face has the tension & resolution of vigorous manhood. He has been a very temperate man.
A man is but a little thing in the midst of these great objects of nature, the
mountains, the clouds, and the cope of the horizon & the globes of heaven,
yet a man by moral quality may abolish all thoughts of magnitude & and in
his manner equal the majesty of the world.
** According to accounts in Pliny and elsewhere, the 4th century Rhodian painter
Protogenes, dissatisfied with a painting of a dog he has been working on, threw
a sponge at it in disgust; by chance, the sponge hit the dog’s mouth, producing
the foaming effect he had desired.
"The Doctrine of Necessity or Destiny is the doctrine of Tolerance but
every moment whilst we think of this offending person that he is ridden by the
devil & go to pity him comes in our sensibility to persuade us that the
person is the devil, then the poison works, the devil jumps on our neck &
back again wilder on the other; jumps from neck to neck, & the kingdom of
hell comes in.’
Ezra Ripley (1751-1841) was born in Woodstock,
Connecticut, the fifth of 19 children. He graduated from Harvard in 1776. Two
years later, he was ordained minister of the First Church on Concord, taking
over from Emerson’;\s recently deceased grandfather, William, whose widow,
Phebe Bliss, he soon married, and whose son – Emerson’s father – he would go on
the raise. He would serve as pastor of the First Church for almost 63 years, in
1834, he invited Emerson and his mother, Ruth, to live with him in Concord’s
Old Manse, where Emerson remained until his marriage the next year, working on
the essay Nature (1836). ‘He ever reminds
one’, Emerson noted during his stay there, ‘both his wisdom & in the faults
of his intellect, of an Indian Sagamore, a sage within the limits of his own
observation, a child beyond. ‘ After his death, Emerson wrote, ‘I am sure all
who remember . . . will associate his form with whatever was
grave and droll in the old, cold, unpainted, uncarpeted, square-pewed meetinghouse.’
Ralph Waldo Emerson; Selected Journals
1841-1877; Lawrence Rosenwald , editor. Library of America. Journal G. 1842
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