Brook Farm: Historic and Personal MemoirsCodman, John Thomas
History
Brook Farm: Historic and Personal Memoirs
Codman, John Thomas
Brook Farm Phalanx (West Roxbury, Boston, Mass.)
The paper was not local. It aimed high as a purely literary and
critical as well as progressive journal, and I must ever consider it a
fault that it did not chronicle more of Brook Farm life. We look almost
in vain through its pages for one word of its situation, finding none
except in some allusions to it in the correspondence from abroad.
Occasionally the school was advertised in a corner, but for the rest it
might as well have been published elsewhere as at Brook Farm. The
leaders, feeling that the life there was an experiment, and perhaps a
doubtful one, were not disposed to gratify a curiosity which they
probably considered morbid, by yielding to it. This was a mistake. It
was a mistake, as much as it would be for us to leave out of our
letters to our friends the petty incidents of daily life, and describe
only grand principles and outside events. It is only to those loved
most by us that we recite the trivial things, for we know that those
trivialities link us closer than anything else, filling all the chinks
in our friendship or love. It was a disappointment to those who desired
to know often of the spirit of the workers, and of the little events
that happened there, not to find more notices of them.
In many other respects the _Harbinger_ was a grand success. In all that
pertained to music, criticism, poetry and progress no journal stood
higher. I cannot tell of its pecuniary success for I do not find any
memorandum of its finances. The first number commenced with a story
translated from the French of George Sand (Madame Dudevant) entitled
"Consuelo"--in some respects the sweetest story she ever wrote. It was
translated by our neighbor, Mr. Francis G. Shaw, who would oftentimes
mount his horse, and, with his little boy, a tiny fellow, on a pony by
his side, gallop over to see us. How hard it is for me to realize that
afterward the same little fellow, as Col. Robert G. Shaw, led his
colored regiment through fire and smoke and the whizzing bullets up to
the cannon's mouth of bloody Fort Wagner, and there laid down his life
for his country.
Francis George Shaw was of a Boston family and a gentleman of means. He
took great interest in our experiment and its hoped-for results. I have
not words to praise his kindness, and his gentlemanly manner and
bearing towards us all. He looked on life from a high standpoint.
Wealth did not corrupt him. He was a Christian in large heartedness and
philanthropy. He recognized his Maker's image in all men; the garment
he saw through; the color he saw through; and he desired above all
things the education, progress and culture of all the human family.
Appended is an additional list of all the advertised contributors of
the _Harbinger_, during its publication at Brook Farm, not including
those already mentioned:--
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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