“’Oh! days that once I used to prize,
Are ye forever gone? 
The veil is taken from my eyes,
And now I stand alone.’

“But I would not recall those by-gone days, nor do I stand alone.  No!  Out from this life will spring a higher world, of which the past was but a weak, faint shadow.”

________________________

CHAPTER V

AT BROOK FARM

THE famous though short-lived community at West Roxbury, Massachusetts, where Isaac Hecker made his first trial of the common life, was started in the spring of 1841 by George Ripley and his wife, Nathaniel Hawthorne, John S. Dwight, George P. Bradford, Sarah Sterns, a niece of George Ripley’s, Marianne Ripley, his sister, and four or five others whose names we do not know.  In September of the same year they were joined by Charles A. Dana, now of the New York Sun. Hawthorne’s residence at the Farm, commemorated in the Blithedale Romance, had terminated before Mr. Dana’s began.  The Curtis brothers, Burrill and George William, were there when Isaac Hecker came.  Emerson was an occasional visitor; so was Margaret Fuller.  Bronson Alcott, then cogitating his own ephemeral experiment at Fruitlands, sometimes descended on the gay community and was doubtless “Orphic” at his leisure.  The association was the outcome of many discussions which had taken place at Mr. Ripley’s house in Boston during the winter of 1840-41.  Among the prominent Bostonians who took part in these informal talks were Theodore Parker, Adin Ballou, Samuel Robbins, John S. Dwight, Warren Burton, and Orestes Brownson.  Each of these men, and, if we do not mistake, George Ripley also, presided at the time over some religious body.  Mr. Ballou, who was a Universalist minister of much local renown, was, perhaps, the only exception to the prevailing Unitarian complexion of the assembly.

The object of their discussions seems to have been, in a general way, the necessity for some social reform which should go to the root of the commercial spirit and the contempt for certain kinds of labor so widely prevalent; and, in a special way, the feasibility of establishing at once, on however small a scale, a co-operative experiment in family life, having for its ulterior aim the reorganization of society on a less selfish basis.  They probably considered that, a beginning once made by people of their stamp, the influence of their example would work as a quickening leaven.  They hoped to be the mustard-seed which, planted in a congenial soil, would grow into a tree in whose branches all the birds of the air might dwell.  It was the initial misfortune of the Brook-Farmers to establish themselves on a picturesque but gravelly and uncongenial soil, whose poverty went very far toward compassing the collapse of their undertaking.