death, when the reverberation of her talk would lose much of its
harshness. In fact, however, very much the same qualities that made
Hawthorne a Democrat in polities--his contemplative turn and absence
of a keen perception of abuses, his taste for old ideals, and
loitering paces, and muffled tones--would operate to keep him out of
active sympathy with a woman of the so-called progressive type. We may
be sure that in women his taste was conservative.

It seems odd, as his biographer says, "that the least gregarious of
men should have been drawn into a socialistic community;" but although
it is apparent that Hawthorne went to Brook Farm without any great
Transcendental fervour, yet he had various good reasons for casting
his lot in this would-be happy family. He was as yet unable to marry,
but he naturally wished to do so as speedily as possible, and there
was a prospect that Brook Farm would prove an economical residence.
And then it is only fair to believe that Hawthorne was interested in
the experiment, and that though he was not a Transcendentalist, an
Abolitionist, or a Fourierite, as his companions were in some degree
or other likely to be, he was willing, as a generous and unoccupied
young man, to lend a hand in any reasonable scheme for helping people
to live together on better terms than the common. The Brook Farm
scheme was, as such things go, a reasonable one; it was devised and
carried out by shrewd and sober-minded New Englanders, who were
careful to place economy first and idealism afterwards, and who were
not afflicted with a Gallic passion for completeness of theory. There
were no formulas, doctrines, dogmas; there was no interference
whatever with private life or individual habits, and not the faintest
adumbration of a rearrangement of that difficult business known as
the relations of the sexes. The relations of the sexes were neither
more nor less than what they usually are in American life, excellent;