"The recollection of George Bradford is that of a long life as serene and happy as it was blameless and delightful to others. It was a life of affection and many interests and friendly devotion; but it was not that of a recluse scholar like Edward Fitzgerald, with the pensive consciousness of something desired but undone. George Bradford was in full sympathy with the best spirit of his time. He had all the distinctive American interest in public affairs. His conscience was as sensitive to public wrongs and perilous tendencies as to private and personal conduct. He voted with strong convictions, and wondered sometimes that the course so plain to him was not equally plain to others. "It was a life with nothing of what we call achievement, and yet a life beneficent to every other life that it touched, like a summer wind laden with a thousand invisible seeds that, dropping everywhere, spring up into flowers and fruit. It is a name which to most readers of these words is wholly unknown, and which will not be written, like that of so many of the friends of him who bore it, in our literature and upon the memory of his countrymen. But to those who knew him well, and who therefore loved him, it recalls the most essential human worth and purest charm of character, the truest manhood, the most affectionate fidelity. To those who hear of him now, and perhaps never again, these words may suggest that the personal influences which most envelop and sweeten life may escape fame, but live immortal in the best part of other lives." Among the signers was also Nathaniel Hawthorne, the writer, and it may not be out of place to make here a few comments on his relation to the Brook Farm life, so often alluded to by writers. Hawthorne was an idealist in its broad sense. The idea of a juster and more rational social state pleased him. He felt himself honored, and was very grateful for the appreciation of the men and women by whom he was surrounded in the literary circle of the Transcendental Club, but he never surrendered the well-matured plan of his youth, to be a writer of stories. When, he went to Brook Farm he thought that his manual labors might in a small way do a trifle towards aiding the formation of the ideal state, and evidently felt that in his leisure hours he could compose, write for magazines, and the like; but the hard, unwonted though self-imposed labor, the peculiar surroundings, the buzz and hum of the large family in which he could not fail to take an interest, distracted him from his purpose. James T. Fields, the publisher, said of him, "He was a man who had, so to speak, a physical affinity with solitude." He could not put his mind to his special work. The seclusion in which he had worked before, he could not find, and though "no one intruded on him," as he says, yet he was not in his best element.