turn of mind, loved mystic books and philosophy, and found in the Catholic
Church his true religious home. He secured at Brook Farm a kind of culture
which he much needed, and his abilities were seen by those around him.
After his return to New York, Ripley, and Charles Lane, of Fruitlands,
wrote him in a way which indicated their faith in him as a man of judgment
and liberal aims. He spent some months in Concord, had George P. Bradford
for his tutor, and he rented a room of Mrs. Thoreau, the mother of Henry
D. Thoreau. There again he met the Curtis brothers; but soon after he went
to Holland to prepare for the priesthood, and then entered upon his
life-work. A curious phase in the life of this time was the effort of
Hecker to convert Curtis to his own way of religious thinking, as Curtis
relates in his letters. Even more singular was the attempt of Hecker to
persuade Thoreau into the Catholic Church. Mr. Sanborn has read a letter
in which he proposed to Thoreau to travel on foot with him in Europe. His
real purpose seems to have been to get Thoreau away from Protestants, and
among the influences of the Catholic churches and traditions, and thus to
make a convert of him. In a letter printed in Father Elliott's biography
of Father Hecker, Curtis gave an account of his acquaintance with the
founder of the order of the Paulist Fathers.

"WEST NEW BRIGHTON, STATEN ISLAND, _February 28, 1890._

Dear Sir,--I fear that my recollections of Father Hecker will be of little
service to you, for they are very scant. But the impression of the young
man whom I knew at Brook Farm is still vivid. It must have been in the
year 1843 that he came to the Farm in West Roxbury, near Boston. He was a
youth of twenty-three, of German aspect, and I think his face was somewhat
seamed with small-pox. But his sweet and candid expression, his gentle and
affectionate manner, were very winning. He had an air of singular
refinement and self-reliance combined with a half-eager inquisitiveness,