ascending through, not superseding, nature. But in the scale
of Sense, Intellect, Spirit, I advocated the claims of
Intellect, because those present were rather disposed to
postpone them. On the nature of Beauty we had good talk.
---- seemed in a much more reverent humour than the other
night, and enjoyed the large plans of the universe which
were unrolled.... Saturday,--Well, good-bye, Brook Farm. I
know more about this place than I did when I came; but the
only way to be qualified for a judge of such an experiment
would be to become an active, though unimpassioned,
associate in trying it.... The girl who was so rude to me
stood waiting, with a timid air, to bid me good-bye."

The young girl in question cannot have been Hawthorne's
charming Priscilla; nor yet another young lady, of a most
humble spirit, who communicated to Margaret's biographers
her recollections of this remarkable woman's visits to Brook
Farm; concluding with the assurance that "after a while she
seemed to lose sight of my more prominent and disagreeable
peculiarities, and treated me with affectionate regard."

Hawthorne's farewell to the place appears to have been accompanied
with some reflections of a cast similar to those indicated by Miss
Fuller; in so far at least as we may attribute to Hawthorne himself
some of the observations that he fathers upon Miles Coverdale. His
biographer justly quotes two or three sentences from _The Blithedale
Romance_, as striking the note of the author's feeling about the
place. "No sagacious man," says Coverdale, "will long retain his
sagacity if he live exclusively among reformers and progressive
people, without periodically returning to the settled system of