About the year 1840 there were some thirty of these “phalansteries” in America, many of which had their organs in the shape of weekly or monthly journals, which advocated the principle of Association.  The best known of these was probably the Harbinger, the mouth-piece of the famous Brook Farm Community, which was founded at West Roxbury, Mass., in 1841, and lasted till 1847.  The head man of Brook Farm was George Ripley, a Unitarian clergyman, who had resigned his pulpit in Boston to go into the movement, and who after its failure became and remained for many years literary editor of the New York Tribune.  Among his associates were Charles A. Dana—­now the editor of the Sun—­Margaret Fuller, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and others not unknown to fame.  The Harbinger, which ran from 1845 to 1849—­two years after the break-up of the community—­had among its contributors many who were not Brook Farmers, but who sympathized more or less with the experiment.  Of the number were Horace Greeley, Dr. F. H. Hedge—­who did so much to introduce American readers to German literature—­J.  S. Dwight, the musical critic, C. P. Cranch, the poet, and younger men, like G. W. Curtis and T. W. Higginson.  A reader of to-day, looking into an odd volume of the Harbinger, will find in it some stimulating writing, together with a great deal of unintelligible talk about “Harmonic Unity,” “Love Germination,” and other matters now fallen silent.  The most important literary result of this experiment at “plain living and high thinking,” with its queer mixture of culture and agriculture, was Hawthorne’s Blithedale Romance, which has for its background an idealized picture of the community life; whose heroine, Zenobia, has touches of Margaret Fuller; and whose hero, with his hobby of prison reform, was a type of the one-idea’d philanthropists that abounded in such an environment.  Hawthorne’s attitude was always in part one of reserve and criticism, an attitude which is apparent in the reminiscences of Brook Farm in his American Note Books, wherein he speaks with a certain resentment of “Miss Fuller’s transcendental heifer,” which hooked the other cows, and was evidently to Hawthorne’s mind not unsymbolic in this respect of Miss Fuller herself.

It was the day of seers and “Orphic” utterances; the air was fall of the enthusiasm of humanity and thick with philanthropic projects and plans for the regeneration of the universe.  The figure of the wild-eyed, long-haired reformer—­the man with a panacea—­the “crank” of our later terminology—­became a familiar one.  He abounded at non-resistance conventions and meetings of universal peace societies and of woman’s rights associations.  The movement had its grotesque aspects, which Lowell has described in his essay on Thoreau.  “Bran had its apostles and the pre-sartorial simplicity of Adam its martyrs, tailored impromptu from the tar-pot. . . .  Not a few impecunious zealots abjured the use of money (unless earned by other people), professing to live on the internal revenues of the spirit. . . .  Communities were established where every thing was to be common but common sense.”