My Friends at Brook Farm | Page 8

sentiments with regard to religious affiliation:
"I like a church, I like a cowl, I love a prophet of the soul, And on my heart monastic aisles Fall like sweet strains or pensive smiles, Yet not for all his faith can see Would I that cowled churchman be."
Of all the visitors coming to Brook Farm, I think Emerson was the most welcome. He was beloved by everyone from Dr. Ripley, dear friend and brother clergyman, to Abby Morton's little ones. The messages of cheer and the words of wisdom he brought were received and treasured with intelligent appreciation. I have heard it said that Emerson was at his best when talking in monologue of an evening at the Hive, or in more formal discourse in the grove on Sunday. He was companionable and entered into the life of the place with evident enjoyment--happy but not jovial. He smiled readily and most charmingly, but never laughed. As a young man his personality was most attractive, serene loving-kindness illumining his comely countenance! My mother, also a serene spirit, thought his face the most beautiful she ever saw; and she was sure that laughter would be unseemly and disturbing.
Emerson liked to be with us at times, but never to be one of us. In the beginning Dr. Ripley wrote him a cordial invitation to join the association, the only invitation of the kind he ever gave, I believe. The invitation was declined in a note quoted by Rev. O. B. Frothingham in his admirable biography of Dr. Ripley, as follows:
"It is quite time that I made an answer to your proposition that I should venture into your new community. The design appears to me noble and generous, proceeding as I plainly see from nothing covert or selfish or ambitious but from a manly heart and mind. So it makes all men its friends and debtors. A matter to be entertained in a friendly spirit and examined as to what it has for us.
"I have decided not to join it, yet very slowly and I may almost say, with penitence. I am greatly relieved by learning that your coadjutors are now so many that you will no longer attach that importance to the defection of individuals which you hinted in your letter to me or others might possess--I mean the painful power of defeating the plan."
CHAPTER III
A STRANGER IN A STRANGE LAND
Racial prejudice was cherished as a virtue in the Old Colonie and the real, solid Dutch families found it anything but creditable that Van Der Zee children--we had the honor of being regarded as Van Der Zees in Beaver street--should be sent to an English school in far off Boston town. Massachusetts was, to them, an English colony, and the people there were English, that is to say, foreigners, strangers, and not to be trusted. However, when it was learned that we were actually going, and mother set about making the elaborate preparations considered necessary for so formidable an undertaking, kind friends came in bringing gifts deemed suitable for the occasion, knitted mittens and mufflers, pies and cakes, apples and cider, and choice stores of the cellar and pantry enough to provision a ship for a long cruise. My nearest boy friend, Gratz Van Rensselaer, gave me his knife. How close were our relations may be understood from the fact that we had a private signal, a peculiar whistle of our own which we used to call each other, as boys are wont to do when on terms of exclusive intimacy. To quote Mr. Peggotty, "A man can't say fairer nor that, now, can he?"
When Gratz went down into his pockets and handed me that knife in solemn silence, I fully realized that he was making a sacrifice on the altar of friendship. Any critic of this writing will be justified in objecting that I did not probably formulate the idea in just these terms, but this is about the size of it, all the same.
Whether my schoolmate ever afterward used our call, I do not know, as our parting was a finality, but for my part, I took it with me to Brook Farm where my new mates adopted it forthwith. Later, the elders took it up, and eventually it became widely known over the face of the earth as "the Brook Farm call." It went to California with a young married couple in the early fifties; to China with one of our boys who became the Captain of a Pacific steamer; to Spain and to Russia with another in the United States diplomatic service; to Italy with two girls whose father was an artist; to the Philippines with students returning to their home in Manila, and to all quarters where Brook Farmers found their way, as they seem always to have remembered