ty. Not a few refused to vote
or pay taxes. The writings of Fourier and St. Simon were translated,
and societies were established where co-operation and a community of
goods should take the place of selfish competition.

About the year 1840 there were some thirty of these "phalansteries" in
America, many of which had their organs in the shape of weekly or
monthly journals, which advocated the principle of Association. The
best known of these was probably the _Harbinger_, the mouth-piece of
the famous Brook Farm Community, which was founded at West Roxbury,
Mass., in 1841, and lasted till 1847. The head man of Brook Farm was
George Ripley, a Unitarian clergyman, who had resigned his pulpit in
Boston to go into the movement, and who after its failure became and
remained for many years literary editor of the _New York Tribune_.
Among his associates were Charles A. Dana--now the editor of the
_Sun_--Margaret Fuller, Nathaniel {437} Hawthorne and others not
unknown to fame. The _Harbinger_, which ran from 1845 to 1849--two
years after the break up of the community--had among its contributors
many who were not Brook Farmers, but who sympathized more or less with
the experiment. Of the number were Horace Greeley, Dr. F. H.
Hedge--who did so much to introduce American readers to German
literature--J. S. Dwight, the musical critic, C. P. Cranch, the poet,
and younger men, like G. W. Curtis, and T. W. Higginson. A reader of
to-day, looking into an odd volume of the _Harbinger_, will find in it
some stimulating writing, together with a great deal of unintelligible
talk about "Harmonic Unity," "Love Germination," and other matters now
fallen silent. The most important literary result of this experiment
at "plain living and high thinking," with its queer mixture of culture
and agriculture, was Hawthorne's _Blithedale Romance_, which has for
its background an idealized picture of the community life, whose
heroine, Zenobia, has touches of Margaret Fuller; and whose hero, with
his hobby of prison reform, was a type of the one-idead philanthropists
that abounded in such an environment. Hawthorne's attitude was always
in part one of reserve and criticism, an attitude which is apparent in
the reminiscences of Brook Farm in his _American Note Books_, wherein
he speaks with a certain resentment of "Miss Fuller's transcendental
heifer," which hooked the other cows, and was evidently to Hawthorne's
{438} mind not unsymbolic in this r