reminiscences of Brook Farm in his _American Note Books_, wherein he
speaks with a certain resentment of "Miss Fuller's transcendental
heifer," which hooked the other cows, and was evidently to Hawthorne's
mind not unsymbolic in this respect of Miss Fuller herself.

It was the day of seers and "Orphic" utterances; the air was fall of
the enthusiasm of humanity and thick with philanthropic projects and
plans for the regeneration of the universe. The figure of the
wild-eyed, long-haired reformer--the man with a panacea--the "crank" of
our later terminology--became a familiar one. He abounded at
non-resistance conventions and meetings of universal peace societies
and of woman's rights associations. The movement had its grotesque
aspects, which Lowell has described in his essay on Thoreau. "Bran had
its apostles and the pre-sartorial simplicity of Adam its martyrs,
tailored impromptu from the tar-pot. . . . Not a few impecunious
zealots abjured the use of money (unless earned by other people),
professing to live on the internal revenues of the spirit. . . .
Communities were established where every thing was to be common but
common sense."

This ferment has long since subsided, and much of what was then
seething has gone off in vapor or other volatile products. But some
very solid matters have also been precipitated, some crystals of poetry
translucent, symmetrical, enduring. The immediate practical outcome
was disappointing, and the external history of the agitation is a
record of failed experiments, spurious sciences, Utopian philosophies,
and sects founded only to dwindle away or to be re-absorbed into some
form of orthodoxy. In the eyes of the conservative, or the
worldly-minded, or of the plain people who could not understand the
enigmatic utterances of the reformers, the dangerous or ludicrous sides