In this country various outgrowths from the social body have taken positions on this plane. The masses of our people are not now in sympathy with them. They believe that these little social homes or "communities" are dull and monotonous, and are bound so tightly by creeds as to be obnoxious to freedom of life and ideas. My belief is that the creeds adopted and thrown around them, though often adding to their financial protection, and possibly often being their only safeguards from fraud and knavery, have covered from the public the great dignity, worthiness and beauty of this mode of life; when, therefore, Mr. Ripley formed his society free from any pledges or creeds, it touched a deeper bottom in men's hearts than any like organization had ever sounded. Whatever of failure there was in their actualization, Brook Farm ideas remain. They charm philosophers, poets and statesmen. They work quietly, leavening the social mass. One must be in sympathy with them to know how potent is their action and how with a touch of the old enthusiasm they will be found breaking out again in larger and larger circles of humanity, for in view of the progress of mechanism, science and art in the last fifty years, to form the phalanstery in its material shape would be an easy task. Rev. William Henry Channing expressed himself in this wise to his mother, years after the breaking up of the Association:-- "My dearest mother, I assure you that did I see my way clear to an honorable independence for my family, so as to be just, while kind to them, I should joyfully die in attesting my fixed faith in Association, and I predict that when, years hence, we meet in the spiritual world, you will smilingly bless me and say, 'My son, your personal limitations excepted, you were right.' You will feel proud of my seeming earthly failures then; at least I humbly hope so. If this is all romance it is of that earnest, living strain which I trust ever more and more to be quickened by." At a final visit to Brook Farm he said: "Most beautiful was that last day and all its memories; and never did I feel so calmly, humbly, devoutly thankful that it had been my privilege to fail in this grandest, sublimest, surest of all human movements. Were Thermopylae and Bunker Hill considered successes in their day and generation?" Lying before me is a letter not intended for publication, showing how one member of the Association affectionately regarded his old home. It is as follows:-- PROVIDENCE, R. I., 1871.