future authority upon "the romantic episode" of Brook Farm. Those who had it at heart more than he whose faith and hope and energy were all devoted to its development, and many of whom have every ability to make a permanent record, have never done so, and it is already so much of a thing of the past that it will probably never be done. But the memory of the place and of the time has been recently pleasantly refreshed by the lecture of Mr. Emerson and the Note-Book of Hawthorne. Mr. Emerson, whose mind and heart are ever hospitable, was one of the chief, indeed the chiefest, figure in this country of the famous intellectual "Renaissance" of twenty-five years ago, which, as is generally the case, is historically known by its nickname of "Transcendentalism," a spiritual fermentation from which some of the best modern influences of this country have proceeded.

In his late lecture upon the general subject, Mr. Emerson says that the mental excitement began to take practical form nearly thirty years ago, when Dr. Channing counselled with George Ripley upon the practicability of bringing thoughtful and cultivated people together and forming a society that should be satisfactory. "That good attempt," says Emerson, with a sly smile, "ended in an oyster supper with excellent wines." But a little later it was revived under better auspices, and as Brook Farm made a name which will not be forgotten. Mr. Emerson was never a resident, but he was sometimes a visitor and guest, and the more ardent minds of the romantic colony were always much under his influence. With his sensitively humorous eye he seizes upon some of the ludicrous aspects of the scene and reports them with arch gravity. "The ladies again," he says, "took cold on washing-days, and it was ordained that the gentlemen shepherds should hang out the clothes, which they punctually did; but a great anachronism followed in the evening, for when they began to dance the clothes-pins dropped plentifully from their pockets." And again: "One hears the frequent statement of the country members that one man was ploughing all day and another was looking out of the window all day—perhaps drawing his picture, and they both received the same wages."

In Hawthorne's just published Note-Book he records a great deal of his daily experience at Brook Farm. But he was never truly at home there. Hawthorne lived in the very centre of the Transcendental revival, and he was the friend of many of its leaders, but he was never touched by its spirit. He seems to have been as little affected by the great intellectual influences of his time as Charles Lamb in England. The Custom-house had become intolerable to him. He was obliged to do something. The enterprise at Brook Farm seemed to him to promise Arcadia. But he forgot that the kingdom of heaven is within you, and when he went to the tranquil banks of the Charles he found himself in a barn-yard shovelling manure, and not at all in Arcadia. "Before breakfast I went out to the barn and began to chop hay for the cattle, and with such 'righteous vehemence,' as Mr. Ripley says, did I labor, that in the space of ten minutes I broke the machine. Then I brought wood and replenished the fires, and finally went down to breakfast and ate up a huge mound of buckwheat cakes. After breakfast Mr. Ripley put a four-pronged instrument into my hands, which he gave me to understand was called a pitchfork, and he and Mr. Farley being armed with similar weapons, we all three commenced a gallant attack upon a heap of manure."

Hawthorne was a sturdy and resolute man, and any heap of manure that he attacked must yield; but he had not come to Arcadia to sweat and blister his hands, and his blank and amused disappointment is evident. He had a subtle and pervasive humor, but no spirits. He sees the pleasantness of the place and the beauty of the crops, having knowledge of them and a new interest in them; and he has a quiet conscience because he feels that he is really doing some of the manual work of the world; but he is always a spectator, a critic. He went to Brook Farm as he might have gone to an anchorite's cell; but the fervor that warms and adorns the cold bare rock he does not have, and the mere consciousness of well-doing is a chilly abstraction. "I do not believe that I should be patient here if I were not engaged in a righteous and heaven-blessed way of life. I fear it is time for me, sod-compelling as I am, to take the field again. Even my Custom-house experience was not such a thraldom and weariness; my mind and heart were free. Oh, labor is the curse of the world, and nobody can meddle with it without becoming proportionally brutified!" Very soon, of course, the pilgrim to Arcadia escapes from the manure-yard, and declares as he runs that it was not he, it was a spectre of him, who milked and hoed and toiled in the sun. Hawthorne remained at Brook Farm but a few months, and after he left he never returned thither, even for a visit.

The Blithedale Romance shows that he was not unmindful of its poetic aspect; but his genius was stirring in him, and he felt that he could not work hard with his hands and write also. So he went off, and never came back; and although he may have remembered certain persons kindly, his memory of the place and of his life there could not have been very affectionate. Probably there were other diaries kept at Brook Farm; certainly there were many and many letters written thence, in which still lie, and will forever lie, buried the material for its history. But it is likely to become a tradition only, and upon its finer side more and more unreal, because of such sketches as those of Hawthorne. The most comical part of the whole was its impression—that is, such impression as it made, and without exaggerating its extent or importance upon the steady old conservatism of Boston, which was of the most inflexible and antediluvian type. The enterprise was the more appalling because it seemed somehow to be a natural product of the spirit of society there. The hen of the tri-mountain had herself hatched this inexpressible duckling. Dr. Channing, indeed, was the honored intellectual chief; the culture of Boston had owed much to the liberal theology; old Dr. Beecher had battered that theology in vain; but the liberality of Boston was like the British Whiggery of the last century: it was more intelligent and more patrician than Toryism itself.

Mr. Emerson, as we said, was practically the head—or, at least, the accepted representative—of the new movement. His discourses before the Phi Beta Kappa Society at Harvard College, his address to the divinity students, and his noble Dartmouth oration, followed by his lectures in Boston and his Nature had set the barn-yard—not offensively to retain the metaphor of the hen—into the most resonant cackle, in the midst of Theodore Parker's South Boston sermon, and there was universal thunder. The pulpits which Dr. Beecher had assaulted, and which had watched him serenely, when they heard Parker thought that the very foundations of things were going. The most distinguished chanticleers went to Mr. Emerson's lectures, and when asked if they understood him, shook their stately combs and replied, with caustic superiority, "No; but our daughters do." And when the experiment began at Brook Farm there was no doubt in conservative circles that for their sins this offshoot of Bedlam was permitted in the neighborhood. What it was, what it was meant to be, was inexplicable. Are they fools, knaves, madmen, or mere sentimentalists?... Is this Coleridge and Southey again with their Pantisocracy and Susquehanna Paradise? Is it a vast nursery of infidelity; and is it true that "the abbé or religieux" sacrifices white oxen to Jupiter in the back parlor? What may not be true, since it is within Theodore Parker's parish, and his house, crammed with books, and modest under the pines, is only a mile away?

These extraordinary and vague