Mr. Emerson's lecture is doubtless reliable on the main point for which we quote from it--the Unitarian and Channing-arian origin of Brook Farm--but certainly superficial in its view of the substantial character and final purpose of that Community. Brook Farm, though American and Unitarian in its origin, became afterward the chief representative and propagative organ of Fourierism, as we shall ultimately show. The very blossom of the experiment, by which it seeded the nation and perpetuated its species, was its periodical, _The Harbinger_, and this belonged entirely to the Fourieristic period of its career. Emerson dilates on _The Dial_, but does not allude to _The Harbinger_. In thus ignoring the public function by which Brook Farm was signally related to the great socialistic revival of 1843, and to the whole of American Socialism, Emerson misses what we conceive to be the main significance of the experiment, and indeed of Unitarianism itself. And here we may say, in passing, that this brilliant Community has a right to complain that its story should have to be told by aliens. Emerson, who was not a member of it, nor in sympathy with the socialistic movement to which it abandoned itself, has volunteered a lecture of reminiscences; and Hawthorne, who joined it only to jilt it, has given the world a poetico-sneering romance about it; and that is all the first-hand information we have, except what can be gleaned from obsolete periodicals. George William Curtis, though he was a member, coolly exclaims in _Harper's Magazine:_ "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 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 a thing of the past, that it will probably never be done." In the name of history we ask, Why has not George William Curtis himself made the permanent record? Why has not George Ripley taken the story out of the mouths of the sneerers? Brook Farm might tell its own story through him, for he _was_ Brook Farm. It was George Ripley who took into his heart the inspiration of Dr. Channing, and went to work like a hero to make a fact of it; while Emerson stood by smiling incredulity. It was Ripley who put on his frock and carted manure, and set Hawthorne shoveling, and did his best for years to keep work going, that the Community might pay as well as play. It was no "picnic" or "romantic episode" or chance meeting "in a ship's cabin" to him. His whole soul was bent on making a _home_ of it. If a man's first-born, in whom his heart is bound up, dies at six years old, that does not turn the whole affair into a joke. There were others of the same spirit, but Ripley was the center of them.