knowledge which made him her interpreter; yet still more obvious were the
social sympathy and tenderness of feeling that brought him into intimate
personal relations which time could not touch.

"Something in his appearance and manner, a half-shrinking and smiling
diffidence, an unworn and childlike ardor and unconsciousness, a freshness
of feeling and frankness of address, invested his personality with what we
call quaintness. He was always active, even to apparent restlessness, not
from nervous excitement, but from fulness of life and sympathy. You might
think of a humming-bird darting from flower to flower, of a honey-bee
happy in a garden. He graduated at Harvard, meaning to be a clergyman, but
the publicity, the magisterial posture, the incessant constraint of the
liberty which he valued more than all else, with the lack of oratorical
gifts and of the self-asserting disposition, soon closed that career to
him; afterwards he was one of the most cheerful and charming figures at
Brook Farm in its pleasantest day. All his life he was a teacher, mainly
of private classes, and generally of women, now in Plymouth, now in
Cambridge, now elsewhere, but, wherever he was, always beloved and
welcomed, and bewailed when he departed.

"Mr. Bradford was unmarried, and there was a sentiment of solitude in his
life, but it was scarcely more, so affectionate and devoted were his
relations to his kindred and his friends. His elder sister, Mrs. Samuel B.
Ripley, was one of the most admirably accomplished women in New England,
living for some years in the Old Manse in Concord in which Hawthorne had
lived. Mr. Ripley was the son of the clergyman who married the widow of
his fellow-clergyman who saw from the Manse the battle at Concord Bridge.
Mr. Bradford was very fond of the old town, and Mr. Emerson had no friend
who was a more welcome or frequent guest than George Bradford, who came to
look after the vegetable garden and to trim the trees, and in long walks