Page:Thoreau - His Home, Friends and Books (1902).djvu/132

110 Brook Farm. He allowed his Dial to report the life there, since Margaret Fuller was one of his editors and also in residence at the community, but he was never influenced to identify himself with the communal life. This is not the place to portray further the life of this picturesque settlement with its commingled seraphic thought and manual work. Mr. Lindsay Swift, in his admirable study of Brook Farm, records that, after Alcott's visits and his nebulous symbolism, "the pie was always cut from the centre to the periphery," while a desire for butter was couched in the psychic phrase,—"Is the butter within the sphere of your influence?" One fact must be noted, that Brook Farm, as originally conceived, consisted of an association of individual families. The later influence of Albert Brisbane, promulgator of Fourierism and communism, was responsible for the change in constitution in 1844, which made it a Fourierian Phalanx, akin to the communities at Hopedale, Northampton and the "Ceresco," or Wisconsin, settlement.

"With the same purpose as Brook Farm, but with briefer life, was the experiment of Alcott and his English friends, Lane and Wright, at Harvard, Massachusetts. This plan was executed in 1843, while Thoreau was at Staten Island, but sundry references to it are in the letters interchanged with