Emily was born in the year 1807 on an estate at Cambridge, which had been laid out a century before by Thomas Brattle. Shortly after her birth her parents moved into a house in Brattle Square, Boston, known as the White House. It was built upon a terrace, with steps running down to the square. A large, old-fashioned garden in the rear was one of its attractions. The house had already had two distinguished tenants, Lieutenant-Governor Bolin and John Adams, the latter having lived there when he was a young lawyer. When Emily was fourteen years old her family once more transplanted their household gods, going this time into the house on Franklin Place, to which her beauty brought such fame. It had already begun to manifest itself, and when she was but nine or ten years of age she was frequently stopped on the street by strangers, who asked whose child she was and involuntarily told her of her budding loveliness. Yet so unconscious did she ever appear of its possession, so wholly lacking in personal vanity, that one of her sisters, gazing upon her one night arrayed in a ball-gown, and unable to restrain her admiration, asked her if she realized how beautiful she was. "Yes," she replied, "I know that I am beautiful, but I do not understand why people act so unwisely about it." Her education was begun at Madame English's school, where Russell Sturgis, afterwards a partner of the Barings, said he first made her acquaintance. Like every one else who ever saw her, he never forgot her. More than forty years after her death, writing to thank her daughter for the photograph of a portrait she had sent him, he said, "I remember perfectly the portrait and the time when it was painted. No painter could ever give the brilliant expression which always lighted her beautiful face; the portrait is as good, therefore, as any one could make it." At Dr. Park's school on Mount Vernon Street, then one of the best girls' schools in Boston, Margaret Fuller was one of her school-mates, and confessed later to a sister of Emily's that she would willingly have changed her mental gifts for those of the beauty and magnetism with which Emily was endowed. From Dr. Park's Emily went to Madame Canda's French school on Chestnut Street. Her musical education, which continued till the time of her marriage, was conducted by Mr. Matthew, Mademoiselle Berthien, and Mr. Ostinelli. The long acquaintance existing for generations among the families and individuals who made up the Boston society of Emily Marshall's day, had instilled into it a spirit of delightful simplicity. A traveller from Great Britain who visited the United States early in the century declared that all the people of the Bay State called one another by their Christian names.