they regarded it as a desirable part of education that they should become
acquainted with practical affairs, and especially with agriculture. That
tendency of the time which established Brook Farm and sent Thoreau into
the Concord woods, worked itself out in this desire of two young men to
find life at first hand. Colonel Higginson has said of the fresh life
started by the transcendental movement: "Under these combined motives I
find that I carefully made out, at one time, a project of going into the
cultivation of peaches, thus securing freedom for study and thought by
moderate labor of the hands. This was in 1843, two years before Thoreau
tried a similar project with beans at Walden Pond; and also before the
time when George and Burrill Curtis undertook to be farmers at Concord. A
like course was actually adopted and successfully pursued through life by
another Harvard man a few years older than myself, the late Marston
Watson, of Plymouth, Massachusetts. Such things were in the air, and even
those who were not swerved by 'the Newness' from their intended pursuits
were often greatly as to the way in which they were undertaken."

A letter written by Burrill Curtis, and printed in part by Mr. Cary, gives
the reasons for this experiment. He says it was "for the better
furtherance of our main and original end--the desire to unite in our own
persons the freedom of a country life with moderate out-door occupation,
and with intellectual cultivation and pursuits. At Concord we first took
up our residence in the family of an elderly farmer, recommended by Mr.
Emerson. We gave up half the day (except in hay-time, when we gave the
whole day) to sharing the farm-work indiscriminately with the
farm-laborers. The rest of the day we devoted to other pursuits, or to
social intercourse or correspondence; and we had a flat-bottomed
rowing-boat built for us, in which we spent very many afternoons on the
pretty little river. For our second season we removed to another farm and
farmer's house, near Mr. Emerson and Walden Pond, where we occupied only a