“There was some foundation for Alcott’s despair at ‘Fruitlands,’ and with the ill success that followed him after the flourishing Temple School in Boston. Emerson, the gentlest and least exacting of men, looking at his friend’s situation a few years after the ‘Fruitlands’ experiment, wrote in his private journal— [Illustration: THE BEDROOM Where Mr. Alcott nearly succumbed to his despair at the failure of his “New Eden” ] “‘The plight of Mr. Alcott! The most refined and the most advanced soul we have had in New England; who makes all other souls appear slow and cheap and mechanical; a man of such courtesy and greatness that in conversation all others, even the intellectual, seem sharp, and fighting for victory and angry,—while he has the unalterable sweetness of a muse! Yet because he cannot earn money by his talk or his pen, or by school-keeping, or bookkeeping, or editing, or any kind of meanness,—nay, for this very cause that he is ahead of his contemporaries, is higher than they, and keeps himself out of the shop condescensions and arts which they stoop to,—or, unhappily, need not stoop to, but find themselves, as it were, born to; therefore it is the unanimous opinion of New England judges that this man must die! We do not adjudge him to hemlock or garroting,—we are much too hypocritical and cowardly for that. But we not less surely doom him by refusing to protest against this doom, or combine to save him, and to set him in employments fit for him and salutary for the State.’” * * * * * The poem written by Mr. Alcott, with the title “The Return,” may fittingly close this chapter:— “As from himself he fled Outcast, insane, Tormenting demons drove him from the gate: Away he sped, Casting his joys behind, His better mind: Recovered, Himself again, Over his threshold led, Peace fills his breast, He finds rest, Expecting angels his arrival wait.” X IN AFTER YEARS More than thirty years after the Fruitlands failure, Mrs. Caroline Sherman, of Chicago, heard from Mr. Alcott its story as he came to view it in later years. She says:—