The other undertaking associated with the Transcendentalists is less formally their own venture. This was the Brook Farm Institute of Agriculture and Education in West Roxbury, nine miles out from Boston. It was financially the undertaking of a small group of stockholders of whom the Reverend George Ripley was the chief and Nathaniel Hawthorne the man of widest later fame. It was an attempt at the start to combine "plain living and high thinking," the theory being that the group could do their own work and pursue their own intellectual life. During the first three years, from 1841 to 1844, it was carried on as a quiet assembling of idealists who were withdrawing slightly from the hubbub of the world. Agriculture was supplemented by several other simple industries, a school was successfully maintained, and the people who lived there were viewed and visited with interest by many who looked on in sympathetic amusement. The number of actual residents never exceeded one hundred and fifty. Of the leading Transcendentalists Margaret Fuller was the only one to settle. Parker was occupied with his multitudinous duties at Boston; Thoreau attempted his own solution at Walden; Alcott was at his short-lived and ill-fated Fruitlands; and Emerson stayed in Concord with the comment: "I do not wish to remove from my present prison to a prison a little larger.... I have not yet conquered my own house. It irks and repents me. Shall I raise the siege of this hen coop, and march baffled away to a pretended siege of Babylon?" In the latter half of its life Brook Farm was drawn into the communistic movement which the French philosopher Charles Fourier had elaborated, and was made the first "phalanx" in America. With this movement its whole nature changed, as it became a part of a great social project with a mission to transform the world. An ambitious central building was erected in 1846, and by an irony of fate the uninsured "phalanstery" was burned down at the very moment when its completion was being celebrated. This last financial burden broke the back of the enterprise, which was discontinued in 1847. It is significant of Brook Farm that however unqualified a material failure it was, it served as a gathering spot for a group of idealists who never ceased to recall their life on the Farm as a happy and fruitful experience. BOOK LIST =_General References_= =Bibliography= In GODDARD, H. C. Studies in New England Transcendentalism. 1908. See also Cambridge History of American Literature, Vol. I, pp. 546-549. =_History and Criticism_= COOKE, G. W. Poets of Transcendentalism: an Anthology with Introductory Essay. 1903. EMERSON, R. W. The Transcendentalist, in _Nature, Addresses and Lectures_. FROTHINGHAM, O. B. Transcendentalism in New England, a History. 1876. GODDARD, H. C. Studies in New England Transcendentalism. 1908.