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,
George Ripley also, presided at the time over some religious body.
Mr. Ballou, who was a Universalist minister of much local renown,
was, perhaps, the only exception to the prevailing Unitarian
complexion of the assembly.

The object of their discussions seems to have been, in a general way,
the necessity for some social reform which should go to the root of
the commercial spirit and the contempt for certain kinds of labor so
widely prevalent; and, in a special way, the feasibility of
establishing at once, on however small a scale, a co-operative
experiment in family life, having for its ulterior aim the
reorganization of society on a less selfish basis. They probably
considered that, a beginning once made by people of their stamp, the
influence of their example would work as a quickening leaven. They
hoped to be the mustard-seed which, planted in a congenial soil,
would grow into a tree in whose branches all the birds of the air
might dwell. It was the initial misfortune of the Brook-Farmers to
establish themselves on a picturesque but gravelly and uncongenial
soil, whose poverty went very far toward compassing the collapse of
their undertaking.

Not all of the ministers whose names have just been mentioned were of
one mind, either as to the special evils to be counteracted or the
remedies which might be