* * * * * Mr. Sanborn says in his “Memoirs of Bronson Alcott”:— “Those who read Louisa’s ‘Transcendental Wild Oats’ will see by her names ‘Timon Lion’ for Lane, and ‘Abel Lamb’ for Alcott, that she looked on her father as rather the victim of Lane in the ‘Fruitlands’ failure. Without conceding this, the impartial observer will say that Lane had the stronger will, and the far more prosaic nature; that he decided most of the questions for his associates in both countries, and that he was rather a hard person to get on with. Neither his first wife, nor Wright, nor Mrs. Alcott, nor Alcott himself, nor the Harvard Shakers, nor finally Oldham, could quite suit him. He over-persuaded Alcott, who was a good farmer and mechanic, to adopt impossible modes of working the ‘Fruitlands’ farm, and much of their whimsies in dress and food seem to have come from Lane and his English friends. Mrs. Alcott, when reëstablished in a home of her own at Concord, early in 1845, offered Lane a home there, and he tried it for a time in the next summer, but still complained, as he had at ‘Fruitlands,’ that she wished to keep her family small, and made it uncomfortable for guests. Knowing Mrs. Alcott’s character well, in the last twenty years of her life, I cannot believe that this was ever true of her. She was hospitality itself, whether poor or rich; and it must have been Lane’s own individualism that made him dissatisfied. [Illustration: CHARLES LANE’S ROOM The old cowhide trunk, in which some of the most valuable of the books were shipped from London; also the old chest in which the linen was kept. The spinning-wheel belonged to a former owner. ] “The rigors of a New England winter promoted the dissolution of the ‘Fruitlands’ Community, but did not alone break it up. A lack of organizing power to control the steady current of selfishness, as well as the unselfish vagaries of his followers, was the real cause. Nothing in fact could be more miserable than the failure of this hopeful experiment.” * * * * * Mr. Alcott had written in his diary of Emerson:—“It is much to have the vision of the seeing eye. Did most men possess this, the useful hand would be empowered with new dexterity also. Emerson sees me, knows me, and more than all others helps me,—not by noisy praise, not by low appeals to interest and passion, but by turning the eye of others to my stand in reason and the nature of things. Only men of like vision can apprehend and counsel each other. A man whose purpose and act demand but a day or an hour for their completion can do little by way of advising him whose purposes require years for their fulfilment. Only Emerson, of this age, knows me, of all that I have found. Well, every one does not find _one_ man, one _very man through and through_. Many are they who live and die alone, known only to their survivors of an after-century.”