PROVIDENCE, R. I., 1871.
"My Dear Friend:—I herewith return the letters you so kindly sent me. I have derived much pleasure in their perusal, and have looked on them with affectionate regard as a mode of greeting from old friends from whom I have been separated for more than a quarter of a century. I do not think any one who was at Brook Farm has that deep and sincere affection for it and its memory that I have. It was my mother by adoption, and what little I have of education, refinement, or culture and taste for matters above things material, I owe to her and the heroic and self-sacrificing men and women who composed its body, social and scholastic. I was but a cipher there, among them by accident, and I was much the gainer even if they were not the losers. What I saw there, and what I learned there, have been of great value to me, and if I have made any progress in material matters or have attained any social position, I am frank enough to confess that I owe it all to dear old Brook Farm. God bless its memory. What I have, and what I am, is the outgrowth of a two years' life at my first real home. . . .
"When I commenced this I intended to write but a half dozen lines, simply making my acknowledgment of your kindness, but my purpose soon changed, and I now find that I have not enough room on this sheet to say one tithe of what comes rushing in my mind 'as a river' about Brook Farm, and I can now only say that I wish you to convey my kindest regards to all of our dear old acquaintances whenever you see them or write to them. All Brook Farmers are to me as brothers and sisters, and I so esteem them.
"WILLIAM H. TEEL."
I am tempted also to add the following extract from a letter written years ago by a friend of the movement in his eightieth year to his son:—
"To many, Brook Farm may have been a dream that ended with the scattering of that little band of workers. That special form of the dream vanished, but the seed was planted, and my confidence in the dream is vivid still. In the past these ideas have been the crude visions of the few, but now they are the absorbing subjects of speculation of the many, and all our best literature is full of them. The highest problems of man and society are the common subjects of discussion. So will it continue to be, by the tiller of the soil, the workman at the bench, as well as the poet and philosopher, until order and harmony are evolved out of this chaos. The good time is surely coming. 'The world,' as Whittier wrote, 'is gray with its dawning light.'
"J. A. SAXTON.
"Deerfield, Mass."
Well, the Brook Farm experiment died! There can be only one reason why its friends should rejoice, and it is the same that touched the great mind of Saint Paul, nearly two thousand years ago, when he said, "Thou fool! that which thou sowest is not quickened except it die!"