he 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-idea'd 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
mind not unsymbolic in this respect of Miss Fuller herself.

It was the day of seers and "Orphic" utterances; the air was fall of
the enthusiasm of humanity and thick with philanthropic projects and
plans for the regeneration of the universe. The figure of the
wild-eyed, long-haired reformer--the man with a panacea--the "crank" of
our later terminology--became a familiar one. He abounded at
non-resistance conventions and meetings of universal peace societies
and of woman's rights associations. The movement had its grotesque
aspects, which Lowell has described in his essay on Thoreau. "Bran had
its apostles and the pre-sartorial simplicity of Adam its martyrs,
tailored impromptu from the tar-pot. . . . Not a few impecunious
zealots abjured the use of money (unless earned by other people),
professing to live on the internal revenues of the spirit. . . .
Communities were established where every thing was to be common but
common sense."

This ferment has long since subsided, and much of what was then
seething has gone off in vapor or other volatile products. But some
very solid matt