the principles of justice and love to our social organisation in accordance with the laws of Divine Providence; to substitute a system of brotherly co-operation for one of selfish competition; to secure to our children, and those who may be intrusted to our care, the benefits of the highest physical, intellectual, and moral education which in the progress of knowledge the resources at our command will permit; to institute an attractive, efficient, and productive system of industry; to prevent the exercise of worldly anxiety by the competent supply of our necessary wants; to diminish the desire of excessive accumulation by making the acquisition of individual property subservient to upright and disinterested uses; to guarantee to each other for ever the means of physical support and of spiritual progress; and thus to impart a greater freedom, simplicity, truthfulness, refinement, and moral dignity to our mode of life; we, the undersigned, do unite in a voluntary association, and adopt and ordain the following articles of agreement." Among "the undersigned" was not the name of Ralph Waldo Emerson.

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AN

XXI.

A SIX YEARS' DAY-DREAM.

ND so, said Emerson in the first number of the "Dial," "with diligent hands and good intent we set down our 'Dial' on the earth. We wish it may resemble that instrument in its celebrated happiness, that of measuring no hours but those of sunshine. Let it be one cheerful rational voice amidst the din of mourners and polemics. Or, to abide by our chosen image, let it be such a dial, not as the dead face of a clock-hardly, even, such as the gnomon in a garden -but rather such a dial as the garden itself, in whose leaves and flowers and fruits the suddenly awakened sleeper is instantly apprised, not what part of dead time, but what state of life and growth, is now arrived and arriving."

With this sentence, which Rabelais would have set up in gold in his clockless Abbey of Thelema, appeared that magazine which lasted through the morning hours of the movement it registered. It was set upon the earth, and the days were marked by the closing of errors, the unfolding of truths, gently and sweetly as in the floral dial of Linnæus. Some weeds were, indeed, intermingled, but no poisons; and if one would know the spirit of this American movement, let him

compare the records of any controversy in Christian annals with these which report the deliverance of America from them all. Margaret Fuller and Emerson edited it, but in the most catholic spirit. Through this organ men and women since eminent gave their early thoughts to the world, and around these for leading strains there is a chorus of clever writers, all of whom are so charged with the new ideas that their voices seem to come from aërial land raised above the everyday world.

But the "Dial" had not been long published before these scattered feeders on honeydew had come to know each other, and it was inevitable that their insulation from the general world should lead to the formation of some project like that which was already leading restless minds westward from Europe. Emerson has traced the origin of the Brook Farm community to a consultation between Dr. Channing and George Ripley upon the practicability of bringing thoughtful and cultivated people together and forming a society that should be satisfactory. "That good attempt," said Mr. Emerson, "ended in an oyster-supper with excellent wines." Afterward, however, it was revived in Brook Farm, which, Emerson thinks, showed sufficiently that farming and scholarship were not exactly synonymous. "The

ladies took cold on washing-days, and it was ordained that the gentlemen-shepherds should hang out the clothes, which they punctually did; but a great anachronism followed in the evening, for when they began to dance, the clothes-pins dropped plentifully from their pockets. . . . One hears the frequent statement of the country members that one man was ploughing

all day and another was looking out of the window all day perhaps drawing his picture and they both received the same wages." Emerson had not faith enough in the feasibility of such a community, had it been possible for him to surrender his time for the disposal of the wisest counsel, to become a resident; but he was a frequent visitor, and his coming caused more sensation than if he had been an archbishop.

The publication of Hawthorne's "Note-Books," which contain such lively descriptions of his life at Brook Farm, elicited an interesting paper in "Harper's Magazine" from George W. Curtis, of whom Hawthorne speaks in "The Blithedale Romance" as the man who could best write the real history of that very interesting movement. X

"When the experiment began at Brook Farm, there was no doubt in conservative circles that for their sins this offshoot of Bedlam was permitted in the neighbourhood. What it was, what it was meant to be, were equally inexplicable. Are they fools, knaves, madmen, or mere sentimentalists? Is this Coleridge and Southey again, with their Pantisocracy and Susquehanna Paradise? Is it a vast nursery of infidelity? and is it true that the abbé or religieux' sacrifices white oxen to Jupiter in the back parlour? What may not be true, since it is within Theodore Parker's parish, and his house, crammed with books, and modest under the singing pines, is only a mile away? These extraordinary and vague and hostile impressions were not relieved by the appearance of such votaries of the new shrine as appeared in the staid streets and halls of the city. There is always a certain amount of oddity latent

in society which rushes to such an enterprise as a natural vent; and in youth itself there is a similar latent and boundless protest against the friction and apparent unreason of the existing order. At the time of the Brook Farm enterprise this was everywhere observable. The freedom of the anti-slavery reform and its discussions had developed the 'come-outers,' who bore testimony in all times and places against church and state. Mr. Emerson mentions an apostle of the gospel of love and no money, who preached zealously, but never gathered a large church of believers. Then there were the protestants against the sin of flesh-eating, refining into curious metaphysics upon milk, eggs, and oysters. To purloin milk from the udder was to injure the maternal affections of the cow; to eat eggs was Feejee cannibalism, and the destruction of the tender germ of life; to swallow an oyster was to mask murder. A still selecter circle denounced the chains that shackled the tongue, and the false delicacy that clothed the body. Profanity, they said, is not the use of forcible and picturesque words; it is the abuse of such to express base passions and emotions. So indecency cannot be affirmed of the model of all grace, the human body. The fig-leaf is the sign of the Fall. Man returning to Paradise will leave it behind. The priests of this faith, therefore, felt themselves called upon to rebuke true profanity and indecency by sitting at their front-doors upon Sunday mornings with no other clothing than that of the pre-fig-leaf period, tranquilly but loudly conversing in the most stupendous oaths, by way of conversational chiaroscuro, while a deluded world went shuddering by to church. These were