On those of our readers whose acquaintance with Father Hecker dates, as our own does, from his intensely active and laborious prime, these revelations of the period when he was being passively wrought upon and shaped for his work by the hand of God, may produce an effect not unlike that we have been conscious of in studying the greater mass from which our extracts are taken.  They will, perhaps, be struck, in the first place, by the unexpectedly strong witness they bear to the wholly interior and mystical experience of the man.  They testify, moreover, to the real and objective character of that leading which he was constrained to follow; and not only that.  They do so in a way which furnishes a convincing reply to a very plausible doubt as to whether the narrow and uncongenial surroundings of his early life might not, by themselves, be sufficient to explain the discontent of a poetic and aspiring nature such as his.

He was at Brook Farm when that community was at its pleasantest.  The shadow of care and the premonition of failure were, indeed, already looming up before those who bore the chief responsibilities of the undertaking, but the group by virtue of whose presence it became famous had hardly begun to dwindle.  And besides those whose names have since become well known, there were others, young, gay, intelligent, and well bred, acquaintance and familiarity with whom were in many ways attractive to a susceptible youth like Isaac Hecker.  What impression he made upon the circle he entered, how cordially he was received and held in high esteem, our readers already know.  And if he gave pleasure, he received it also.  At first the new circumstances were a little strange and embarrassing to him.  After a fortnight, or thereabouts, we find him noting that he is “not one of their spirits.  They say ‘Mr. Hecker’ in a tone they do not use in speaking to each other.”  But the strangeness soon wore off and he yielded to the influence of the place with a wholeness which would have been entire but for the stronger drawing which never let him free.

On this point, too, the witness of the journal is peremptory.  So it is as to the unity and consistence of his interior experiences from first to last.  Child, and boy, and man, there was always the same ardent sincerity of purpose in him, the same docility to the Voice that spoke within, the same attitude toward “the life that now is” which Mr. Curtis, in the letter given in the preceding chapter, has described, with so fine an insight, as one of reserve and observation.  “He was the dove floating in the air, not yet finding the spot on which his foot might rest,” writes Mr. Curtis of Isaac Hecker at that period of his youth when his surroundings and companions were for the first time, and very possibly for the last, wholly congenial to his natural inclinations.  And again:  “There was nothing ascetic or severe in him; but I have often thought since that his feeling was probably what he might have afterward described as a consciousness that he must be about his Father’s business.”