Many have striven to find
sufficient release from their hard, unimproving routine work to enable them
to escape its dwarfing effects and to live a fuller life on a higher plane.
The Brook Farm settlement included such people as Nathaniel Hawthorne,
Charles A. Dana (1819-1897), afterward editor of the New York _Sun_, George
Ripley, in later times distinguished as the literary critic of the New York
_Tribune_, and GEORGE WILLIAM CURTIS (1824-1892), who became a well-known
essayist, magazine editor, and civil service reformer. The original
pioneers numbered about twenty; but the membership increased to nearly one
hundred and fifty. Brook Farm had an influence, however, that could not be
measured by the number of its inmates. In one year more than four thousand
visitors came to see this new social settlement.
Hawthorne, the most famous literary member of the Brook Farm group, has
recorded many of his experiences during his residence there in 1841:--
"April 13. I have not yet taken my first lesson in agriculture, except
that I went to see our cows foddered, yesterday afternoon. We have eight
of our own; and the number is now increased by a transcendental heifer
belonging to Miss Margaret Fuller.
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