In the remoter region of Canton, Thomas Bailey Aldrich has a sometime summer home, erected among enchanting landscapes, where he has pondered and written much of his dainty prose and daintier poesy. The curious name of this rural retreat is preserved in the title of his entertaining volume of travel-sketches, "From Ponkapog to Pesth." The tree near his door was the home of the pair of birds he described in the delightful sketch "Our New Neighbors at Ponkapog."
A morning's drive westward through the shade and sheen of a delectable urban district conveys us to the village of Auburndale, where we find the tasteful cottage home of Louise Imogen Guiney,Miss Guiney with its French roofs, wide windows, square tower, and embosoming foliage. Here, if we come properly accredited, we may (or might before she became the village postmistress) see the gifted poetess of "White Sail" and "Roadside Harp" and essayist of "English Gallery" and "Prose Idyls"—a petite and attractive young lady—at her desk, surrounded by her treasures of books and bric-à-brac and with the portraits of many friends looking down upon her from the walls of the square upper room where she writes. She has little to say concerning her own work,—fascinating as it is to her,—but discourses pleasantly on many topics and narrates con amore the history of the precious tomes and the literary relics she has gathered here, and describes the traits and lineage of her beloved canine pets, who have been execrated by some of her neighbors.
Brook Farm
Nearer Jamaica Plain is the quiet corner of West Roxbury, where the exalted community of Brook Farmers attempted to realize in external and material fashion their high ideals and to inaugurate the precursor of an Arcadian era. In this season, "the sweet o' the year," we find the farm a delightful spot, fully warranting Hawthorne's eulogium in "Blithedale Romance." The songful stream which gives the place its name is margined by verdant and sun-kissed meads which slope away to the circling Charles; on either side, fields and picturesque pastures—broken here and there by rocky ledges and copse-covered knolls—swell upward to feathery acclivities of pine and oak, with rugged escarpments of rock. From the elevation about the farm-house we overlook most of the domain of these social reformers,—the many acres of woodlands, the orchards and fields where Ripley, George William Curtis, Hawthorne, Dwight, Bedford, Pratt, Dana, and other transcendental enthusiasts held sublimated discourse while they performed the coarsest farm drudgery, applied uncelestial fertilizers, "belabored rugged furrows," or delved for the infinite in a peat-bog. Curtis has said "there never were such witty potato-patches, such sparkling corn-fields; the weeds were scratched out of the ground to the music of Tennyson and Browning." The farm-house stands above the highway, and is shaded by giant trees planted by Ripley and his associates. It is a commodious, antiquated structure of weather-worn wood, two stories in height, with a vast attic beneath the sloping roofs and an extension which has been recently enlarged. The original edifice is a ponderous fabric of almost square form, with an entrance in the middle of the front, massive chimneys at either end, and contains four spacious lower rooms, besides an outer scullery. Here we see the sitting-room of the reformers, where at first Channing sometimes preached and the now "Nestor of American journalism" sang bass in the choir; their refectory, where Dana served as head-waiter; and their brick-paved kitchen, where the erudite Mrs. Ripley and the soulful Margaret Fuller sometimes helped to prepare the bran bread and baked beans for the exalted brotherhood. Adjoining is the old "wash-room," where some who have since become famous in literature or politics pounded the soiled linen in a hogshead with a heavy wooden pestle; and just without is the turf-carpeted yard where the dignified and handsome Hawthorne, the brilliant Charles A. Dana (who certainly was the most popular member of the community), and the genial Curtis were sometimes seen hanging the moist garments upon the lines, a truly edifying spectacle for gods and men. It was from Curtis's pockets that the clothes-pins sometimes dropped during the evening dances. Some of the trees yet to be seen near the house were rooted from the nursery established here by Dana.
This old house was the original "Hive" of the community, who added the extensive wing at the back, but increasing numbers soon forced a portion of the company to swarm, and other dormitories were erected. Of these we find vestiges of the "Eyrie"—which was also used as a school-house—upon a commanding ledge at a little distance from the house, and nearer the grove where the rural festivals of the association were held. Of the "Nest," the little house where Miss Ripley lived, the "Cottage," where Margaret Fuller lodged during her sojourns at the farm, the large barn, where social séances were held while the starry company prepared vegetables for the market, and the other steading erected by the community, only the cellars and broken foundations remain. In the wood at some distance from the house is the "Eliot's Pulpit" of Coverdale's narrative, a mass of rock crowning a knoll and having a great fissure through its core; in the forest beyond we may find "Coverdale's Walk," and the "Hermitage" where he heard by accident the colloquy of Westervelt and Zenobia.
After the day of Ripley's brilliant colony the broad acres of Brook Farm were tilled by the town poor, and—"to what base uses!"—the pretty cottage of Margaret Fuller became a loathsome small-pox pest-house; the rooms of the "Hive," after six years of familiarity with ideal refiners and reformers, became the abode of paupers, and at this day are aswarm with an odorous multitude of German orphans, wards of a Lutheran society that now owns the place.
While the pilgrim may find but few traces of the physical labors of the choice spirits who once inhabited this spot, the beneficent results of the mental and moral work here accomplished—especially among the young—are manifest and ineffaceable. These infertile fields yielded but scant returns for the manual toil of the optimistic philosophers, but their earnest strivings toward social and mental emancipation have borne abundant fruit.