genial cultivation of a scholar to the amenities of the natural gentleman;
a sturdy farmer-neighbor [Edmund Hosmer], who had bravely fought his weary
way through inherited embarrassment to the small success of a New England
husbandman; two city youths [George and Burrill Curtis], ready for the
fragments from the feast of wit and wisdom; and the host himself, composed
the club. Ellery Channing, who had that winter harnessed his Pegasus to
the New York _Tribune_, was a kind of corresponding member. The news of
this world was to be transmitted through his eminently practical genius,
as the club deemed itself competent to take charge of tidings from all
other spheres.

"I went the first evening very much as Ixion may have gone to his banquet.
The philosophers sat dignified and erect. There was a constrained but very
amiable silence, which had the impertinence of a tacit inquiry, seeming to
ask, 'Who will now proceed to say the finest thing that has ever been
said?' It was quite involuntary and unavoidable, for the members lacked
that fluent social genius without which a club is impossible. It was a
congress of oracles on the one hand, and of curious listeners upon the
other. I vaguely remember that the Orphic Alcott invaded the Sahara of
silence with a solemn 'Saying,' to which, after due pause, the honorable
member for Blackberry Pastures responded by some keen and graphic
observations, while the Olympian host, anxious that so much material
should be spun into something, beamed smiling encouragement upon all
parties. But the conversation became more and more staccato. Hawthorne, a
statue of night and silence, sat a little removed, under a portrait of
Dante, gazing imperturbably upon the group; and as he sat in the shadow,
his dark hair and eyes and suit of sables made him, in that society, the
black thread of mystery which he weaves into his stories; while the
shifting presence of the Brook Farmer played like heat lightning around
the room.