Of a more distinctly academic cast were some of the companies later assembled in this same room—Judge Story, Doctor Beck, President Felton, Professors Pierce, Lane, Child, and Lowell, with maybe Longfellow, listening to one of his own songs, or that strange figure, Professor Evangelinus Apostolides Sophocles, oddly ill at ease in his suit of dingy black. In his younger days he had been both pirate and priest, and he retained, as professor, some of his early habits—seldom being seated while he talked, and leaning against the door, shaking and fumbling his college keys as the monks shake their rosaries. Mr. Arthur Gilman has related in a charming article on Fay House, written for the Harvard Graduates Magazine (from which, as from Miss Norris's sketch of the old place, printed in a recent number of the Radcliffe Magazine, many of the incidents here given are drawn), that Professor Sophocles was allowed by Miss Fay to keep some hens on the estate, pets which he had an odd habit of naming after his friends. When, therefore, some accomplishment striking and praiseworthy in a hen was related in company as peculiar to one or another of them, the professor innocently calling his animals by the name he had borrowed, the effect was apt to be startling.
During the latter part of Miss Fay's long tenancy of this house, she had with her her elder sister, the handsome Mrs. Greenough, a woman who had been so famous a beauty in her youth that, on the occasion of her wedding, Harvard students thronged the aisles and climbed the pews of old Christ Church to see her. The wedding receptions of Mrs. Greenough's daughter and granddaughter were held, too, in Fay House. This latter girl was the fascinating and talented Lily Greenough, who was later a favourite at the court of Napoleon and Eugénie, and who, after the death of her first husband, Mr. Charles Moulton, was married in this house to Monsieur De Hegermann Lindencrone, at that time Danish Minister to the United States, and now minister at Paris. Her daughter, Suzanne Moulton, who has left her name scratched with a diamond on one of the Fay House windows, is now the Countess Suzanne Raben-Levetzan of Nystel, Denmark.
In connection with the Fays' life in this house occurred one thing which will particularly send the building down into posterity, and will link for all time Radcliffe and Harvard traditions. For it was in the upper corner room, nearest the Washington Elm, that Doctor Samuel Gilman, Judge Fay's brother-in-law, wrote "Fair Harvard," while a guest in this hospitable home, during the second centennial celebration of the college on the Charles. Radcliffe girls often seem a bit triumphant as they point out to visitors this room and its facsimile copy of the famous song. Yet they have plenty of pleasant things of their own to remember.
Just one of these, taken at random from among the present writer's own memories of pretty happenings at Fay House, will serve: During Duse's last tour in this country, the famous actress came out one afternoon, as many a famous personage does, to drink a cup of tea with Mrs. Agassiz in the stately old parlour, where Mrs. Whitman's famous portrait of the president of Radcliffe College vies in attractiveness with the living reality graciously presiding over the Wednesday afternoon teacups. As it happened, there was a scant attendance at the tea on this day of Duse's visit. She had not been expected, and so it fell out that some two or three girls who could speak French or Italian were privileged to do the honours of the occasion to the great actress whom they had long worshipped from afar. Duse was in one of her most charming moods, and she listened with the greatest attention to her young hostesses' laboured explanations concerning the college and its ancient home.
The best of it all, from the enthusiastic girl-students' point of view, was, however, in the dark-eyed Italienne's mode of saying farewell. As she entered her carriage—to which she had been escorted by this little group—she took from her belt a beautiful bouquet of roses, camellias, and violets. And as the smart coachman flicked the impatient horses with his whip, Duse threw the girls the precious flowers. Those who caught a camellia felt, of course, especially delighted, for it was as the Dame aux Camellias that Duse had been winning for weeks the plaudits of admiring Boston. My own share of the largesse consisted of a few fresh, sweet violets, which I still have tucked away somewhere, together with one of the great actress's photographs that bears the date of the pleasant afternoon hour passed with her in the parlour where the "Brothers and Sisters" met.
THE BROOK FARMERS
One of the weddings noted in our Fay House chapter was that of Sophia Dana to George Ripley, an event which was celebrated August 22, 1827, in the stately parlour of the Cambridge mansion, the ceremony being performed by the father of Oliver Wendell Holmes. The time between the date of their marriage and the year 1840, when Mr. and Mrs. Ripley "discovered" the milk-farm in West Roxbury, which was afterward to be developed through their efforts into the most remarkable socialistic experiment America has ever known, represented for the young people joined together in what is now the home of Radcliffe College some dozen years of quiet parsonage life in Boston.
The later years of George Ripley's life held for him a series of disappointments before which his courage and ideals never failed. When the young student left the Harvard Divinity School, he was appointed minister over a Unitarian parish which was gathered for him at the corner of Pearl and Purchase Streets, Boston. Here his ministrations went faithfully on, but inasmuch as his parishioners failed to take any deep interest in the social questions which seemed to him of most vital concern, he sent them, in the October of 1840, a letter of resignation, which they duly accepted, thus leaving Ripley free to enter upon the experiment so dear to him.
The Ripleys, as has been said, had already discovered Brook Farm, a pleasant place, varied in contour, with pine woods close at hand, the Charles River within easy distance, and plenty of land—whether of a sort to produce paying crops or not they were later to learn. That winter Ripley wrote to Emerson: "We propose to take a small tract of land, which, under skilful husbandry, uniting the garden and the farm, will be adequate to the subsistence of the families; and to connect with this a school or college in which the most complete instruction shall be given, from the first rudiments to the highest culture." Ripley himself assumed the responsibility for the management and success of the undertaking, and about the middle of April, 1841, he took possession with his wife and sister and some fifteen others, including Hawthorne, of the farmhouse, which, with a large barn, was already on the estate.