CHAPTER V.
AT BROOK FARM THE famous though short-lived community at West Roxbury, Massachusetts, where Isaac Hecker made his first trial of the common life, was started in the spring of 1841 by George Ripley and his wife, Nathaniel Hawthorne, John S.Dwight, George P.Bradford, Sarah Sterns, a niece of George Ripley's, Marianne Ripley, his sister, and four or five others whose names we do not know.

In September of the same year they were joined by Charles A.Dana, now of the New York _Sun._ Hawthorne's residence at the Farm, commemorated in the _Blithedale Romance,_ had terminated before Mr.Dana's began.

The Curtis brothers, Burrill and George William, were there when Isaac Hecker came.

Emerson was an occasional visitor; so was Margaret Fuller.

Bronson Alcott, then cogitating his own ephemeral experiment at Fruitlands, sometimes descended on the gay community and was doubtless "Orphic" at his leisure.