ening around me, I remember our scheme of noble and unselfish life; and how fair in that first summer appeared the prospect that it might endure for generations, and be perfected, as the ages rolled away, into the system of a people and a world! Were my former associates now there were there only three or four of those true-hearted men still laboring in the sun, I sometimes fancy that I should direct my world-weary footsteps thitherward, and entreat them to receive me, for old friendship's sake. More and more I feel that we had struck upon what ought to be a truth. Posterity may dig it up, and profit by it. The experiment, so far as its original projectors were concerned, proved, long ago, a failure; first lapsing into Fourierism, and dying, as it well deserved, for this infidelity to its own higher spirit. Where once we toiled with our whole hopeful hearts, the town-paupers, aged, nerveless, and disconsolate, creep sluggishly a-field. Alas, what faith is required to bear up against such results of generous effort." * Hawthorne. Alas, too, we repeat, that such should be the results of so many generous efforts and selfsacrifices, "Employed In forming models to improve the scheme *Wordsworth. VIII. Fruitlands. "When will the hundred summers die? And thought and time be born again, And newer knowledge, drawing nigh, Bring truth that sways the hearts of men ?" TENNYSON. EFORE we introduce the reader to the BEFOR family at Fruitlands, we must inform him that, though the individuals composing it sympathized with the undertaking at Brook Farm, yet in many points they disagreed, and were dissimilar. The Fruitlanders took a more ascetic, spiritual, and religious view of life. To put the reader in current of their thought, we will make a few extracts from some of their writings. "I am an organized being; I made not myself, I am unable to improve myself; there may be, there must be, an organizing power. This power I would discover, but I make not my own faculties, and I am not moved to seek it; faith I want, but I make not faith, and where am I to obtain it? How is it to come to me? I perceive; this very intuition of regenerative, or higher, purer life, is the basis of all the rest. "This intuition we will cherish, as a loving, tender mother the first-born of her conception. It is a holy inspiration, coming down from heaven, to elevate the human propensities, from the animal degradation to the intellectual and moral regions. To none others than those who have the inborn idea, can the appeal for improvement be fairly or rationally addressed. But all are conscious of it, though not in an equal degree, and therefore all may be addressed. Where the inspiration is not, humanity is not. "If men could be brought to the discernment of the loss they sustain by alienation from God, how readily would they submit to every thing that is called privation, until they were again placed in that true relationship, that should bring them at one with their heavenly Parent, from whom alone they can ever receive love, or peace, or joy. "In holding at a greater distance and at a lighter estimate the objects about and below him, there comes to man a higher and higher sense of his true destiny; and the clearer intuition of his high destiny enables man to hold in a lighter and easier manner, the objects about him and below him." "Those who would inherit the glory of a new and heavenly life must first bear the cross to every lust and appetite, and evil propensity, even although this cross should require, as it did in the case of Jesus of Nazareth, the surrender of life itself." "A well-fed man is never a central thinker." "Here, then, we take our stand, and call upon all the friends of purity, virtue, and truth, to aid us to hold fast to the faithful practice of abstinence from all self-generating, lust-increasing habits of life. An undeviating celibacy for the kingdom of heaven's sake, is the first |