"Mother, I cannot express the depth of gratitude I feel toward you for the tender care and loving discipline with which you brought me up to manhood. Without it, oh! what might I not have been? The good that I have, under God, I am conscious that I am greatly indebted to thee for; at times I feel that it is thou acting in me, and that there is nothing that can ever separate us. A bond which is as eternal as our immortality, our life, binds us together and cannot be broken.
"Mother, that I should be away from home at present no doubt makes you sorrowful often, and you wish me back. Let me tell you how it is with me. The life which surrounds me in New York oppresses me, contracts my feelings, and abridges my liberty. Business, as it is now pursued, is a burden upon my spiritual life, and all its influence hurtful to the growth of a better life. This I have felt for a long time, and feel it now more intensely than before. And the society I had there was not such as benefited me. My life was not increased by theirs, and I was gradually ceasing to be. I was lonely, friendless, and without object in this world, while at the same time I was conscious of a greater degree of activity of mind in another direction. These causes still remain. . . .
". . . I feel fully conscious of the importance of making any change in my life at my present age—giving up those advantages which so many desire; as well as the necessity of being considerate, prudent, and slow to decide. I am aware that my future state here, and hence hereafter, will greatly depend upon the steps I now take, and therefore I would do nothing unadvised or hastily. I would not sacrifice eternal for worldly life. At present I wish to live a true life, desiring nothing external, seeing that things external cannot procure those things for and in which I live. I do not renounce things, but feel no inclination for them. All is indifferent to me—poverty or riches, life or death. I am loosed. But do not on this account think I am sorrowful; nay, for I have nothing to sorrow for. Is there no bright hope at a distance which cheers me onward and beckons me to speed? I dare not say. Sometimes I feel so—it is the unutterable. Yet I remain contented to be without spring or autumn, youth or age. One tie has been loosened after another; the dreams of my youth have passed away silently, and the visions of the future I then beheld have vanished. I feel awakened as from a dream, and like a shadow has my past gone by. With the verse at the bottom of the picture you gave me, I can say:
"'Oh! days that once I used to prize,
Are ye forever gone?
The veil is taken from my eyes,
And now I stand alone.'
"But I would not recall those by-gone days, nor do I stand alone. No! Out from this life will spring a higher world, of which the past was but a weak, faint shadow."
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CHAPTER V
AT BROOK FARM
THE famous though short-lived community at West Roxbury, Massachusetts, where Isaac Hecker made his first trial of the common life, was started in the spring of 1841 by George Ripley and his wife, Nathaniel Hawthorne, John S. Dwight, George P. Bradford, Sarah Sterns, a niece of George Ripley's, Marianne Ripley, his sister, and four or five others whose names we do not know. In September of the same year they were joined by Charles A. Dana, now of the New York Sun. Hawthorne's residence at the Farm, commemorated in the Blithedale Romance, had terminated before Mr. Dana's began. The Curtis brothers, Burrill and George William, were there when Isaac Hecker came. Emerson was an occasional visitor; so was Margaret Fuller. Bronson Alcott, then cogitating his own ephemeral experiment at Fruitlands, sometimes descended on the gay community and was doubtless "Orphic" at his leisure. The association was the outcome of many discussions which had taken place at Mr. Ripley's house in Boston during the winter of 1840-41. Among the prominent Bostonians who took part in these informal talks were Theodore Parker, Adin Ballou, Samuel Robbins, John S. Dwight, Warren Burton, and Orestes Brownson. Each of these men, and, if we do not mistake, George Ripley also, presided at the time over some religious body. Mr. Ballou, who was a Universalist minister of much local renown, was, perhaps, the only exception to the prevailing Unitarian complexion of the assembly.
The object of their discussions seems to have been, in a general way, the necessity for some social reform which should go to the root of the commercial spirit and the contempt for certain kinds of labor so widely prevalent; and, in a special way, the feasibility of establishing at once, on however small a scale, a co-operative experiment in family life, having for its ulterior aim the reorganization of society on a less selfish basis. They probably considered that, a beginning once made by people of their stamp, the influence of their example would work as a quickening leaven. They hoped to be the mustard-seed which, planted in a congenial soil, would grow into a tree in whose branches all the birds of the air might dwell. It was the initial misfortune of the Brook-Farmers to establish themselves on a picturesque but gravelly and uncongenial soil, whose poverty went very far toward compassing the collapse of their undertaking.