Excerpt from Mrs. Samuel Ripley: Letters to Ralph Waldo Emerson, His Sister, and Other Noted People IN gathering up the treasures of the last century, some record has been desired of the life of mrs. Sarah alden ripley, of Massachusetts. Mrs. Ripley was known and revered in the region where she lived, as one who combined rare and living knowledge of literature and science with the household skill and habits of personal labor needful to New England women of limited means, and with the tenderest affection and care for the young brothers and sisters whom her mother's delicate health and death left to her charge, and for the seven children of her own marriage who grew up under her eye in the country parson age at Waltham. To the ordinary cares of her station were added those of assisting her husband in the cares of a boys' boarding-school, both in housekeeping and teaching. These claims were met with disinterested devotion. And amid' all the activity of her busy life the love and habit of acquiring knowledge, which was the life of her age as of her ardent youth, kept even pace. To a friend has now been committed the trust of making some selections from Mrs. Ripley's letters written in youth, in early married life, in the later days when her children had grown up and rest seemed approaching, and in the last days at the Old Manse in Concord, her husband's paternal in heritance, to which they had retired in the Spring of 1846, as a paradise of rest in age. The letters thus arrange themselves in four chapters. As a continuous history of events, they leave many gaps unfilled. At times of domestic changes. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.