During the earlier years the men, who were in excess of the young women in point of numbers, helped very largely in the household labours. George William Curtis occasionally trimmed lamps, Charles Dana, who afterward founded the New York Sun, organised a band of griddle-cake servitors composed of "four of the most elegant youths of the Community!" One legend, which has the air of probability, records that a student confessed his passion while helping his sweetheart at the sink. Of love there was indeed not a little at Brook Farm. Cupid is said to have made much havoc in the Community, and though very little mismating is to be traced to the intimacy of the life there, fourteen marriages have been attributed to friendships begun at Brook Farm, and there was even one wedding there, that of John Orvis to John Dwight's sister, Marianne. At this simple ceremony William Henry Channing was the minister, and John Dwight made a speech of exactly five words.
Starting with about fifteen persons, the numbers at the farm increased rapidly, though never above one hundred and twenty people were there at a time. It is estimated, however, that about two hundred individuals were connected with the Community from first to last. Of these all the well-known ones are now dead, unless, indeed, one is to count among the "Farmers" Mrs. Abby Morton Diaz, who as a very young girl was a teacher in the infant department of the school.
Yet though the Farmers have almost all passed beyond, delicious anecdotes about them are all the time coming to light. There is one story of "Sam" Larned which is almost too good to be true. Larned, it is said, steadily refused to drink milk on the ground that his relations with the cow did not justify him in drawing on her reserves, and when it was pointed out to him that he ought on the same principle to abandon shoes, he is said to have made a serious attempt to discover some more moral type of footwear.
And then there is another good story of an instance when Brook Farm hospitality had fatal results. An Irish baronet, Sir John Caldwell, fifth of that title, and treasurer-general at Canada, after supping with the Community on its greatest delicacy, pork and beans, returned to the now departed Tremont House in Boston, and died suddenly of apoplexy!
This baronet's son was wont later to refer to the early members of the Community as "extinct volcanoes of transcendental nonsense and humbuggery." But no witty sallies of this sort are able to lessen in the popular mind the reverence with which this Brook Farm essay in idealism must ever be held. For this Community, when all is said, remains the most successful and the most interesting failure the world has ever known.
MARGARET FULLER: MARCHESA D'OSSOLI
Any account of Brook Farm which should neglect to dwell upon the part played in the community life by Margaret Fuller, Marchesa d'Ossoli, would be almost like the play of "Hamlet" with the Prince of Denmark left out. For although Margaret Fuller never lived at Brook Farm—was, indeed, only an occasional visitor there—her influence pervaded the place, and, as we feel from reading the "Blithedale Romance," she was really, whether absent or present, the strongest personality connected with the experiment.
Hawthorne's first bucolic experience was with the famous "transcendental heifer" mistakenly said to have been the property of Margaret Fuller. As a matter of fact, the beast had been named after Cambridge's most intellectual woman, by Ripley, who had a whimsical fashion of thus honouring his friends. According to Hawthorne, the name in this case was not inapt, for the cow was so recalcitrant and anti-social that it was finally sent to Coventry by the more docile kine, always to be counted on for moderate conservatism.
This cow's would-be-tamer, not wishing to be unjust, refers to this heifer as having "a very intelligent face" and "a reflective cast of character." He certainly paid Margaret Fuller herself no such tribute, but thus early in his Brook Farm experience let appear his thinly veiled contempt for the high priestess of transcendentalism. Even earlier his antagonism toward this eminent woman was strong, if it was not frank, for he wrote: "I was invited to dine at Mr. Bancroft's yesterday with Miss Margaret Fuller, but Providence had given me some business to do for which I was very thankful."