Passing from college to the counting-room of a great commercial business, his sagacity, energy, and executive power were all brought into successful action. He went to Europe and to the West Indies, but much of the spirit of trade and many of its practices were uncongenial to him, and he quietly withdrew, despite wonder and affectionate remonstrance, to lead his own life in his own way. By taste and temperament an out-door man, he made his home in the rural neighborhood of Boston, busy with country cares and various studies, but interested chiefly in helping other men. He was allied by sympathy more than by much previous actual association with the founders of Brook Farm. But when they chose the site for their enterprise not far from his house, he was soon in the pleasantest relations with the leaders, for their spirit and purpose were in harmony with his own. He was a parishioner and warm personal friend of Theodore Parker, who lived near him, and his keen common-sense and mastery of practical affairs were most useful to Parker as to Ripley. Indeed, the hospitality of such a man for every generous endeavor and for all new and humane ideas was a happy augury for the philanthropic pioneers, because it seemed to promise the final approval and adhesion to their cause of the most conservative and substantial sentiment of the community. Such a man was, of course, an abolitionist in the days when the name was as repugnant to what is called "society" as the name Christian was to the Jewish Sanhedrim or Methodist to the English Establishment a century and a half ago. He generously aided the cause, which seemed to him that of practical Christianity and of American patriotism, and he held most friendly relations with its chief representatives, who were ostracized and denounced. But his sympathy was not an abstract regard for man rather than for men, and his interest in the effort to help a race and to forecast a happier social organization did not dull his heart or close his hand to the necessities of his neighbor. His life, indeed, was a prolonged charity, but a charity directed by a singularly calm and shrewd judgment. His exhaustless generosity was not the sport of wayward impulse. It was not a well-meaning weakness, but a wise force which helped others to help themselves, but knew also when such self-help was impossible. Yet the strength and reserve and independence of his character were such that the man was never lost in the reformer. His fine nature instinctively asserted his own individuality. He quietly shunned the wearisome artificiality of society, but he did not merge his own home in the general home of his friends and neighbors at Brook Farm, and his house was always a glimpse of the social refinement and grace, the mental and moral charm, to which the dreams of social regeneration and the elaborate fancies of Fourier pointed--fancies which greatly interested him as hints of a happier social order.