Had he stayed longer, this newness of situation would doubtless have worn off, and he would have found a seclusion little dreamed of at first acquaintance with the life. He was in haste to be at his writing; so after a few months of manual labor, bidding adieu to the farm, he found himself back in Boston. There were other interests that carried him there, for we find that in the next year he married Sophia Peabody of Salem, Mass. Critics have said that the Brook Farm life was hurtful to his genius. He never once intimated it, but said afterwards to Emerson that he was "almost sorry he did not stay with the Brook Farmers and see it out to the finish." The most ingenuous, the most simple-minded of all men in matters of ordinary business, in relative values and exchanges, and unwilling to act as teacher, he could only be counted as an ordinary day-laborer, except where he could use the twin gifts of intellect and imagination with which he was so highly endowed. His allusion to his "having had the good fortune, for a time, to be personally connected with it," and "his old and affectionately remembered home at Brook Farm" speak volumes, as does also this little passage from "Blithedale Romance":-- "Often in these years that are darkening around me, I remember our beautiful scheme of a noble and unselfish life, and how fair in that first summer appeared the prospect that it might endure for generations, and be perfected, as the ages rolled by, into the system of a people and a world. Were my former associates now there--were there only three or four of those true-hearted men still laboring in the sun--I sometimes fancy that I should direct my world-weary footsteps thitherward, and entreat them to receive me for old friendship's sake. More and more I feel we struck upon what ought to be a truth. Posterity may dig it up and profit by it." In "Years of Experience" the writer, Georgiana (Bruce) Kirby, one of the early associates, says:-- "Hawthorne, after spending a year at the Community, had now left. No one could have been more out of place than he in a mixed company, no matter how cultivated, worthy and individualized each member of it might be. He was morbidly shy and reserved, needing to be shielded from his fellows, and obtaining the fruits of observation at second-hand. He was therefore not amenable to the democratic influences at the Community which enriched the others, and made them declare, in after years, that the years or months spent there had been the most valuable ones in their lives." Messrs. W. B. Allen, Minot Pratt, Warren Burton, Charles Hosmer, Isaac Hecker and George C. Leach, with Mr. Hawthorne, devoted most of their time to outdoor farm work.