Ripley Was a pastor, a polemic, a translator, and for many years the scholarly critic in a great newspaper office (the Tribune) of New York; but his Brook Farm experiment in the art of living in a Community is the one thing that will not be forgotten in his busy years, and is continually the subject of new in quiries. If So, too, with Bronson Alcott. He lived to his 89th year; he stood before the public in many capacities; but the one point of curiosity now, as during that half century which followed the giving up of his Fruit lands monastery in January, 1844, is the brief history of that Arcadian episode in his patriarchal existence.) To that, and to what immediately preceded and followed that, I can therefore best devote the pages of this monograph, designed especially for the dwellers in that broad midland area of our common country which, in 1840-44, (the Dial period) was hardly inhabited at all, save by the roving Indian and his big game, the buffalo.