In his preface to the _Marble Faun_, as before in that to _The Blithedale Romance_, Hawthorne complained that there was no romantic element in American life; or, as he expressed it, "There is as yet no such Faery-land so like the real world that, in a suitable remoteness, one cannot tell the difference, but with an atmosphere of strange enchantment, beheld through which the inhabitants have a propriety of their own." This he says in _The Blithedale_ preface, and then adds that, to obviate this difficulty and supply a proper scene for his figures, "the author has ventured to make free with his old and affectionately remembered home at Brook Farm as being certainly the most romantic episode of his own life, essentially a day-dream, and yet a fact, and thus offering an available foothold between fiction and reality." Probably a genuine Brook-Farmer doubts whether Hawthorne remembered the place and his life there very affectionately, in the usual sense of that word, and although in sending the book to one of them, at least, he said that it was not to be considered a picture of actual life or character. "Do not read it as if it had anything to do with Brook Farm [which essentially it has not], but merely for its own story and characters," yet it is plain that it is a very faithful picture of the kind of impression that the enterprise made upon him. Strangely enough, Hawthorne is likely to be the chief future authority upon "the romantic episode" of Brook Farm. Those who had it at heart more than he whose faith and hope and energy were all devoted to its development, and many of whom have every ability to make a permanent record, have never done so, and it is already so much of a thing of the past that it will probably never be done. But the memory of the place and of the time has been recently pleasantly refreshed by the lecture of Mr. Emerson and the _Note-Book_ of Hawthorne. Mr. Emerson, whose mind and heart are ever hospitable, was one of the chief, indeed the chiefest, figure in this country of the famous intellectual "Renaissance" of twenty-five years ago, which, as is generally the case, is historically known by its nickname of "Transcendentalism," a spiritual fermentation from which some of the best modern influences of this country have proceeded.