to the plough and
supported himself and the community, as they were all supposed to do,
by his labour; but he contributed little to the hum of voices. Some of
his companions, either then or afterwards, took, I believe, rather a
gruesome view of his want of articulate enthusiasm, and accused him of
coming to the place as a sort of intellectual vampire, for purely
psychological purposes. He sat in a corner, they declared, and watched
the inmates when they were off their guard, analysing their
characters, and dissecting the amiable ardour, the magnanimous
illusions, which he was too cold-blooded to share. In so far as this
account of Hawthorne's attitude was a complaint, it was a singularly
childish one. If he was at Brook Farm without being of it, this is a
very fortunate circumstance from the point of view of posterity, who
would have preserved but a slender memory of the affair if our
author's fine novel had not kept the topic open. The complaint is
indeed almost so ungrateful a one as to make us regret that the
author's fellow-communists came off so easily. They certainly would
not have done so if the author of _Blithedale_ had been more of a
satirist. Certainly, if Hawthorne was an observer, he was a very
harmless one; and when one thinks of the queer specimens of the
reforming genus with which he must have been surrounded, one almost
wishes that, for our entertainment, he had given his old companions
something to complain of in earnest. There is no satire whatever in
the _Romance_; the quality is almost conspicuous by its absence. Of
portraits there are only two; there is no sketching of odd figures--no
reproduction of strange types of radicalism; the human background is
left vague. Hawthorne was not a satirist, and if at Brook Farm he was,
according to his habit, a good deal of a mild sceptic, his scepticism
was exercised much more in the interest of fancy than in that of
reality.

There must have been something pleasantly bucolic and pastoral in the
habits of the place during the fine New England summer; but we have no
retrospective envy of the denizens of Brook Farm in that other season
which, as Hawthorne somewhere says, leaves in those regions, "so large
a blank--so melancholy a deathspot--in lives so brief that they ought
to be all summer-time." "Of a summer night, when the moon was full,"
says Mr. Lathrop, "they lit no lamps, but sat grouped in the light and
shadow, while sundry of the younger men sang old b