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,