“He was a general favorite at Brook Farm, always equable and playful, wholly simple and frank in manner.  He talked readily and easily, but not controversially.  His smile was singularly attractive and sympathetic, and the earnestness of which I have spoken gave him an unconscious personal dignity.  His temperament was sanguine.  The whole air of the youth was that of goodness.  I do not think that the impression made by him forecast his career, or, in any degree, the leadership which he afterwards held in his Church.  But everybody who knew him at that time must recall his charming amiability.

“I think that he did not remain at Brook Farm for a whole year, and when later he went to Belgium to study theology at the seminary of Mons he wrote me many letters, which I am sorry to say have disappeared.  I remember that he labored with friendly zeal to draw me to his Church, and at his request I read the life and some writing of St. Alphonse of Liguori.  Gradually our correspondence declined when I was in Europe, and was never resumed; nor do I remember seeing him again more than once, many years ago.  There was still in the clerical figure, which was very strange to me, the old sweetness of smile and address; there was some talk of the idyllic days, some warm words of hearty good will, but our interests were very different, and, parting, we went our separate ways.  For a generation we lived in the same city, yet we never met.  But I do not lose the bright recollection of Ernest the Seeker, nor forget the frank, ardent, generous, manly youth, Isaac Hecker.

“Very truly yours,

“GEORGE WILLIAM CURTIS.”

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CHAPTER VI

INNER LIFE WHILE AT BROOK FARM

THE private journals from which we are about to quote so largely were an unhoped-for addition to the stock of materials available for Father Hecker’s biography.  Until after his death not even their existence, still less the nature of their contents, was suspected.  With the exception of two important documents, one written while he was in Belgium, in obedience to the requirements of his director; the other in Rome, for the consideration of the four venerable religious whose advice he sought before founding his community, no records of his interior life have been discovered which are at all comparable in fulness to those made during the eighteen months which preceded his admission to the Church.  In his years of health and strength he lived and worked for others; and in those weary ones of illness which followed them, he thought and wrote and suffered, but apparently without making any deliberate notes of his deeper personal experience.