His father, William Smith, "was a lawyer of limited means, but versatile mind and genial disposition." His mother, Harriet Fowle 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 of wife and mother in a well-ordered and eminently hospitable household wherein she was dearly loved. She was without appetite for luxury or display or praise or influence, with entire indifference to triffles. . . . As she advanced in life her personal beauty, not remarked in youth, drew the notice of all."
There could have been no nobler, saner influence for an intellectual boy than the companionship of this unusual woman, and if we are to begin at the beginning of Wellesley's story, we must begin with Mrs. Ripley, for Mr. Durant often said that she had great influence in inclining his mind in later life to the higher education of women.
From Waltham the young man went in 1837 to Harvard, where we hear of him as "not specially studious, and possessing refined and luxurious tastes which interfered somewhat with his pursuit of the regular studies of the college." But evidently he was no ordinary idler, for he haunted the Harvard Library, and we know that all his life he was a lover of books. In 1841 he was graduated from Harvard, and went home to Lowell to read law in his father's office, where Benjamin F. Butler was at that time a partner.
The dilettante attitude which characterized his college years is now no longer in evidence. He writes to a friend, "I shall study law for the present to oblige father; he is in some trouble, and I wish to make him as happy as possible. The future course of my life is undetermined, except that all shall yield to holy poetry.
Indeed it is a sacred duty. I have begun studying law; don't be afraid, however, that I intend to give up poetry. I shall always be a worshiper of that divinity, and l hope in a few years to be able to give up everything and be a priest in her temple." After a year he writes, "I have not written any poetry this whole summer.
Old Mrs. Themis says that I shall not visit any more at the Miss Muses. I'll see the old catamaran hanged, though, but what I will, and I'll write a sonnet to my old shoe directly, out of mere desperation. Pity and sympathize with me." And on March 28, 1843, we find him writing to a college friend:
"I have been attending courts of all kinds and assisting as junior counsel in trying cases and all the drudgery of a lawyer's life.
One end of my labor has been happily attained, for about three weeks ago I arrived at the age of twenty-one, and last week I mustered courage to stand an examination of my qualifications for an attorney, and the result (unlike that of some examinations during my college life) was fortunate, with compliments from the judge. I feel a certain vanity (not unmixed, by the way, with self-contempt) at my success, for I well remember l and a dear friend of mine used to mourn over the impossibility of our ever becoming business men, and lo, I am a lawyer.-- I have a right to bestow my tediousness on any court of the Commonwealth, and they are bound to hear me."
From 1843 to 1847 he practiced at the Middlesex Bar, and from 1847, when he went to live in Boston, until 1863, he was a member of the Suffolk Bar. On November 25, 1851, he had his name changed by act of the Legislature. There were eleven other lawyers by the name of Smith, practicing in Boston, and two of them were Henry Smiths. To avoid the inevitable confusion, Henry Welles Smith became Henry Fowle Durant, both Fowle and Durant being family names.
