With his head set low upon his gladiatorial shoulders, and his nasal
voice in subtle and exquisite mimicry reproducing what was truly
laughable, yet all with infinite _bonhomie_ and with a genuine
superiority to small malice, he was as humorous as he was learned, and as
excellent a mime as he was noble and fervent and humane a preacher. On
Sundays a party always went from the Farm to Mr. Parker's little country
church. He was there exactly what he was afterwards when he preached to
thousands of eager people in the Boston Musichall; the same plain,
simple, rustic, racy man. His congregation were his personal friends.
They loved him and admired him and were proud of him; and his geniality
and tender sympathy, his ample knowledge of things as well as of books,
drew to him all ages and sexes and conditions.

"The society at Brook Farm was composed of every kind of person. There
were the ripest scholars, men and women of the most aesthetic culture and
accomplishment, young farmers, seamstresses, mechanics, preachers--the
industrious, the lazy, the conceited, the sentimental. But they were
associated in such a spirit and under such conditions that, with some
extravagance, the best of everybody appeared, and there was a kind of high
_esprit de corps_--at least, in the earlier or golden age of the colony.
There was plenty of steady, essential, hard work, for the founding of an
earthly paradise upon a rough New England farm is no pastime. But with the
best intention, and much practical knowledge and industry and devotion,
there was in the nature of the case an inevitable lack of method, and the
economical failure was almost a foregone conclusion. But there was never
such witty potato-patches and such sparkling cornfields before or since.
The weeds were scratched out of the ground to the music of Tennyson or
Browning, and the nooning was an hour as gay and bright as any brilliant
midnight at Ambrose's. But in the midst of all was one figure, the
practical farmer, an honest neighbor who was not drawn to the enterprise