Even from their lifelessness.
I never spoke the word farewell
But with an utterance faint and broken
A heart with yearning for the time
When it should never more be spoken.
September, 6.
I think the world would be a very dismal world without books. I could not live without them. I take so much pleasure in reading beautiful stories and poetry. I like to hear beautiful words and thoughts. Beautiful is my favorite word. If I like anything I always say it is beautiful. It is a beautiful word. I can’t tell the color of it. Louisa and I took a walk. It was pleasant if it had only been a little warmer. When we returned we sat in our chamber. I wrote down all the beautiful names we could think of, and in the evening wrote the colors of them.
[Here Anna’s journal written at Fruitlands comes to a sudden ending. Numberless pages have been torn out carefully, and Mr. Alcott’s handwriting appears in footnotes here and there, showing that it was he who destroyed the story of the later days of Fruitlands written from his youthful daughter’s pen. It is one more proof of the intensity of his feelings regarding Fruitlands, and the bitter disappointment that Time never softened. His own journal written there has also been destroyed. It seems as if that experience of failure was too heartrending to him to allow the world to share it. We only get glimpses here and there with which to construct a picture of the New Eden where these Transcendentalists worked out a beloved theory and found it wanting. We have the account of the start, so full of enthusiasm and ecstatic hopefulness. The curtain has been drawn over the rest as carefully as was possible. Her journal starts again in 1846, but it does not state the month. In it she mentions a point which reveals something of Mr. Alcott’s philosophy. She says: “Father said that if a person wanted a thing very much and thought of it a great deal, that they would probably have it.”]