Brook Farm was inevitable. Already at New Harmony, Zoar, and elsewhere in the Western States, there had been socialistic experiments. But all the others were more or less imported; this was indigenous, except that, like all other profoundly sincere movements, it borrowed some examples and incentives from the plains of Galilee. The very name given to the first proclamation of the enterprise in the “Dial,” “A Glimpse at Christ’s Idea of Society,”[1] written by Miss E. P. Peabody, shows that this clean element of religious impulse came first; the Fourierite gospel arrived later, and rather marked the decline. To those who like myself visited “the Community” only as observant and rather incredulous boys, under guidance of some enlightened cousin, it all seemed a very pleasant picnic, where youths and maidens did pretty much what they wished, and sang duets over their labors. The very costume was by no means that monotony of old clothes which Hawthorne depicts in the “Blithedale Romance,” for some of the youths looked handsome as Raphael in flowing blouses of various colors and picturesque little vizor-less caps, exquisitely unfitted for horny-handed tillers of the soil. Nowhere was there such good company; young men went from the farm to the neighboring towns to teach German classes; there were masquerades and gypsy parties, such as would thrive on no other soil; whatever might be said of the actual glebe of
- ↑ Dial, ii. 214 (October, 1841).
