"Engage in nothing that cripples or degrades you. Your first duty is self-culture, self-exaltation: you may not violate this high trust. Yourself is sacred, profane it not. Forge no chains wherewith to shackle your own members. Either subordinate your vocation to your life or quit it forever." A writer on _Ideals of Every Day Life_ in _The Dial_ for January, 1841, suggested a thought that is finding an echo in the twentieth century:-- "No one has a right to live merely to get a living. And this is what is meant by drudgery." Two lines in the last volume voice the new spirit of growth and action:-- "I am never at anchor, I never shall be; I am sailing the glass of infinity's sea." _The Dial_ afforded an outlet for the enthusiasms, the aspirations, the ideals of life, during a critical period in New England's renaissance. No other periodical during an equal time has exerted more influence on the trend of American literature. BROOK FARM.--In 1841 a number of people, headed by GEORGE RIPLEY (1802-1880), a Unitarian clergyman, purchased a tract of land of about two hundred acres at West Roxbury, nine miles from Boston. This was known as Brook Farm, and it became the home of a group who wished to exemplify in real life some of the principles that _The Dial_ and other agencies of reform were advocating. [Illustration: POOL AT BROOK FARM] In _The Dial_ for January, 1842, we may find a statement of the aims of the Brook Farm community. The members especially wanted "_leisure to live in all the faculties of the soul_" and they determined to combine manual and mental labor in such a way as to achieve this result. Probably the majority of Americans are in sympathy with such an aim. Many have striven to find sufficient release from their hard, unimproving routine work to enable them to escape its dwarfing effects and to live a fuller life on a higher plane. The Brook Farm settlement included such people as Nathaniel Hawthorne, Charles A. Dana (1819-1897), afterward editor of the New York _Sun_, George Ripley, in later times distinguished as the literary critic of the New York _Tribune_, and GEORGE WILLIAM CURTIS (1824-1892), who became a well-known essayist, magazine editor, and civil service reformer. The original pioneers numbered about twenty; but the membership increased to nearly one hundred and fifty. Brook Farm had an influence, however, that could not be measured by the number of its inmates. In one year more than four thousand visitors came to see this new social settlement. Hawthorne, the most famous literary member of the Brook Farm group, has recorded many of his experiences during his residence there in 1841:--