manner. In a degree he was a curious looker-on; and in a still larger way
he was a sympathetic, but not convinced, friend and well-wisher. If not a
member, he retained throughout life his interest in this experiment, and
remembered with delight the years he spent there. He more than once spoke
in enthusiastic terms of Brook Farm, and gave its theories and its
practice a sympathetic interpretation. In one of his "Easy Chair" essays
of 1869 he described the best side of its life:

"There is always a certain amount of oddity latent in society which rushes
to such an enterprise as a natural vent; and in youth itself there is a
similar latent and boundless protest against the friction and apparent
unreason of the existing order. At the time of the Brook Farm enterprise
this was everywhere observable. The freedom of the antislavery reform and
its discussions had developed the 'come-outers,' who bore testimony in all
times and places against church and state. Mr. Emerson mentions an apostle
of the gospel of love and no money who preached zealously but never
gathered a large church of believers. Then there were the protestants
against the sin of flesh-eating, refining into curious metaphysics upon
milk, eggs, and oysters. To purloin milk from the udder was to injure the
maternal affections of the cow; to eat eggs was Feejee cannibalism and the
destruction of the tender germ of life, to swallow an oyster was to mask
murder. A still selecter circle denounced the chains that shackled the
tongue and the false delicacy that clothed the body. Profanity, they said,
is not the use of forcible and picturesque words; it is the abuse of such
to express base passions and emotions. So indecency cannot be affirmed of
the model of all grace, the human body....

"These were harmless freaks and individual fantasies. But the time was
like the time of witchcraft. The air magnified and multiplied every
appearance, and exceptions and idiosyncrasies and ludicrous follies were