Page:Margaret Fuller Ossoli (Higginson).djvu/195

Rh whitening; and continues to sing with unchanged sweetness the plaintive melodies that hushed the stormiest meeting when he and his four or five long-haired brothers stood grouped round their one rose-bud of a sister like a band of Puritan Bohemians.

Amid all these wild gospellers came and went the calm figure of Emerson, peaceful and undisturbed. I can remember that, after certain of his lectures in Boston, his chosen hearers habitually gathered to meet him at the rooms of one young man, an ardent Fourierite, though not actually a Brook-Farmer. Outside the door was painted in flaming colors a yellow sun, at the centre of whose blazing rays was the motto “Universal Unity,” while beneath it hung another inscription in black and white letters, “Please wipe your feet.” This emblazonment and this caution symbolized the whole movement. The gateway of Brook Farm might have been similarly inscribed. There was a singular moral purity about it which observers from the point of view of Paris or even London have since found a little contemptible. With the utmost freedom in all things, and a comprehensiveness to which that of “the latitude-men about Cambridge” in England was timid conservatism, Brook Farm, like all other haunts of the “come-outers” of the period, was as chaste as a Shaker household.

But it will readily be seen that amid this impulse of universal reform some such enterprise as