"It is not too much to say that every person who was at Brook Farm for any length of time has ever since looked back to it with a feeling of satisfaction. The healthy mixture of manual and intellectual labor, the kindly and unaffected social relations, the absence of everything like assumptions or servility, the amusements, the discussions, the friendships, the ideal and poetical atmosphere which gave a charm to life--all these continue to create a picture toward which the mind turns back with pleasure as to something distant and beautiful not elsewhere met with amid the routine of this world." Whatever may be said of the tone of the articles that come from his pen, their ability is unquestioned, and it is not a secret that in Mr. Ripley's judgment Charles A. Dana, of the New York _Sun_, was the ablest editor in the world. The "Poet," as we called him, as editor of Dwight's _Journal of Music_, and also as critic, was deserving of especial credit for his services in musical culture. Earnest, refined, always endeavoring to do right, but strict in his pleasant criticisms, he pointed upward to higher ideals. Living alone in his latter years like a bachelor, he sought solace in his refined tastes with cultivated people. Married to Mary Bullard, the sweet singer of my story, kindred sympathies united them more firmly than marriage vows, but her early death deprived the world of one of the noblest and choicest of womanhood, and his life of its sweetest charm. He went abroad for a short trip, leaving her in full health and beauty; he returned--she had passed from mortal sight. A number of the members, male and female, joined the Association in New Jersey near Red Bank--the North American Phalanx. There they renewed the social life and experiment, with such result as some other pen can tell. It was about the time of the closing of the Brook Farm experiment that the "California fever" broke out, or the rush for the gold mines. Some of our theorists argued that the country was too poor for the establishment of the social organizations proposed, and that more wealth was needed. A number of the Brook Farmers went to the new country for gold. The gardener, Peter Klienstrup, was one. I am sorry to say that disappointment awaited him. A foreigner, and sensitive, partly deaf and past middle life, he was not the man for the country or the life. He died there poor. His charming, tuneful daughter, with the beautiful complexion and lovely rounded shoulders, did not long survive him. His wife survived, but one day I stood with only a few who knew her, at the door of an open tomb, and a strange thrill passed over me when one by my side said, as her body was placed within, "This is the last of her race--the family is extinct!"