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174 make it unnatural; since you cannot also transfer to your book all the surroundings that have made that character what it is. The author gets his first hint from some real person, — perhaps from several, — and all the rest is his own; or it might almost be said the character’s own, so astounding is the way in which these visionary people take their fates into their own hands and perhaps do the precise things which their creator intended to prevent. If all this is true of the most commonplace novelist, it is especially true of the most ideal of all writers of fiction, Hawthorne. Even his real people, when he writes what he means for sober history, become almost ideal in the atmosphere he paints; how much more with those in his romances. That there was a certain queenliness about Margaret Fuller, that she sometimes came to Brook Farm, and that a cow which was named after her lorded it over the other cows; this was all that she really contributed to Hawthorne’s Zenobia; and much less than this would have been sufficient for his purpose.

Nevertheless Brook Farm was for a few years a fact so large among the circle to which she belonged that it is well to have some good reason for introducing it here. It was one of the best — probably the best — incarnation of the ardent and wide-reaching reformatory spirit of that day. It was a day when it certainly was very pleasant to live, although it is doubtful whether living would have remained as pleasant, had one half the proj-