About the year 1840 there were some thirty of these "phalansteries" in
America, many of which had their organs in the shape of weekly or
monthly journals, which advocated the principle of Association. The
best known of these was probably the _Harbinger_, the mouth-piece of
the famous Brook Farm Community, which was founded at West Roxbury,
Mass., in 1841, and lasted till 1847. The head man of Brook Farm was
George Ripley, a Unitarian clergyman, who had resigned his pulpit in
Boston to go into the movement, and who after its failure became and
remained for many years literary editor of the _New York Tribune_.
Among his associates were Charles A. Dana--now the editor of the
_Sun_--Margaret Fuller, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and others not unknown to
fame. The _Harbinger_, which ran from 1845 to 1849--two years after
the break-up of the community--had among its contributors many who were
not Brook Farmers, but who sympathized more or less with the
experiment. Of the number were Horace Greeley, Dr. F. H. Hedge--who
did so much to introduce American readers to German literature--J. S.
Dwight, the musical critic, C. P. Cranch, the poet, and younger men,
like G. W. Curtis and T. W. Higginson. A reader of to-day, looking
into an odd volume of the _Harbinger_, will find in it some stimulating
writing, together with a great deal of unintelligible talk about
"Harmonic Unity," "Love Germination," and other matters now fallen
silent. The most important literary result of this experiment at
"plain living and high thinking," with its queer mixture of culture and
agriculture, was Hawthorne's _Blithedale Romance_, which has for its
background an idealized picture of the community life; whose heroine,
Zenobia, has touches of Margaret Fuller; and whose hero, with his hobby
of prison reform, was a type of the one-idea'd philanthropists that
abounded in such an environment. Hawthorne's attitude was always in
part one of reserve and criticism, an attitude which is apparent in the