I do not know whether Mr. Brisbane owned stock in the Brook Farm Association or not. Certainly he never gained any dividend by his labor there, but was an interested observer who boarded at the farm at intervals, sometimes passing a few days only, and finally residing some months, occupied in the study and translation of Fourier's works.
He was an enthusiast, but his over enthusiastic moods influenced the Brook Farmers, it seemed to me, often-times unwisely. He saw the full-blown phalanstery coming like a comet and expected every moment. We shortly would be in a blaze of glory! He loved to talk of the good things to be—of social problems worked out by science and by harmonic modes; to flatter himself that without great self-sacrifice, devotion and untiring industry, the world was to be regenerated. It seemed to his mind, that it could be done all at once by organization and enthusiasm, and it was only necessary to create enough of them to carry everything before them as in a bayonet charge.
He labored hard with the society to change its name to Phalanx, and to push the movement as far as possible into the formulas and organization described by Fourier, which did not advance it a single step in material or spiritual progress, and acted, as in the case of the constitution, as a dead weight, owing to the burdensomeness of its details, which called for too much labor to keep the accounts of so complex an organization.
Having described a few of the many persons who were members of the Association, I must speak of three noted persons who are very often accredited as belonging to the West Roxbury Community; they are Miss Margaret Fuller (afterwards Countess D'Ossoli), Ralph Waldo Emerson and Theodore Parker. They were all personal friends of Mr. and Mrs. Ripley, and belonged to the Transcendental Club. In the first period of the experiment the two former made lengthy visits at the farm, but during the Industrial Period only one of them, Mr. Parker, that I remember visited the place. I must except a single visit from Miss Fuller, whom I recall as plain-looking, and plainly to old-fashionedly dressed, with a crane-like neck and a long gold chain around it, which reached to her waist. She talked quite easily and freely, and the impression of the blue-stocking was left perhaps unfortunately on my mind.
Rev. Ralph Waldo Emerson—for he had been an ordained minister—wrote for the Dial, furnished it with queer poems, wrote articles on the wrongs of labor, and agreed fully with Mr. Ripley on so many points that he has been mistaken many times for a Brook Farmer.
Concord, Massachusetts, Mr. Emerson's home, contained a marked radical centre, and some of the Concord people were affiliated by kinship and by sympathy with the Brook Farm people from first to last during the entire experiment. Mr. Ripley invited Mr. Emerson to join it, but he declined in a letter which may be found in Mr. Frothingham's "Life of George Ripley," Appendix, page 315. I make the following extract:—
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"My Dear Sir: It is quite time that I made an answer to your proposition that I should venture into your new community. The design appears to me noble and generous, proceeding as I plainly see, from nothing covert or selfish or ambitious, but from a manly heart and mind. So it makes all men its friends and debtors. It becomes a matter to entertain it in a friendly spirit, and examine what it has for us.
"I have decided not to join it, yet very slowly, and I may almost say with penitence. I am greatly relieved by learning that your coadjutors are now so many that you will no longer attach that importance to the defection of individuals which you hinted, in your letter to me, I or others might possess—the painful power, I mean, of preventing the execution of the plan."
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