and not linear or cubic. Good people are as bad as rogues if steady
performance is claimed; the conscience of the conscientious runs in
veins, and the most punctilious in some particulars are latitudinarian
in others. It was very gently said that people on whom beforehand all
persons would put the utmost reliance were not responsible. They saw
the necessity that the work must be done, and did it not, and it of
course fell to be done by the few religious workers. No doubt there was
in many a certain strength drawn from the fury of dissent. Thus Mr.
Ripley told Theodore Parker, “There is your accomplished friend ----,
he would hoe corn all Sunday if I would let him, but all Massachusetts
could not make him do it on Monday.”
Of course every visitor found that there was a comic side to this
Paradise of shepherds and shepherdesses. There was a stove in every
chamber, and every one might burn as much wood as he or she would
saw. The ladies took cold on washing-day; so it was ordained that the
gentlemen-shepherds should wring and hang out clothes; which they
punctually did. And it would sometimes occur that when they danced
in the evening, clothes-pins dropped plentifully from their pockets.
The country members naturally were surprised to observe that one man
ploughed all day and one looked out of the window all day, and perhaps
drew his picture, and both received at night the same wages. One would
meet also some modest pride in their advanced condition, signified by a
frequent phrase, “Before we came out of civilization.”
The question which occurs to you had occurred much earlier to Fourier:
“How in this charming Elysium is the dirty work to be done?” And long
ago Fourier had exclaimed, “Ah! I have it,” and jumped with joy. “Don’t
you see,” he cried, “that nothing so delights the young Caucasian child
as dirt? See the mud-pies that all children will make if you will let
them. See how much more joy they find in pouring their pudding on the
table-cloth than into their beautiful mouths. The children from six to
eight, organized into companies with flags and uniforms, shall do this
last function of civilization.”
In Brook Farm was this peculiarity, that there was no head. In every
family is the father; in every factory, a foreman; in a shop, a master;
in a boat, the skipper; but in this Farm, no authority; each was
master or mistress of his or her actions; happy, hapless anarchists.
They expressed, after much perilous experience, the conviction that
plain dealing was the best defence of manners and moral between the
sexes. People cannot live together in any but necessary ways. The only
candidates who will present themselves will be those who have tried
the experiment of independence and ambition, and have failed; and none
others will barter for the most comfortable equality the chance of
superiority. Then all communities have quarrelled. Few people can live
together on their merits. There must be kindred, or mutual economy, or
a common interest in their business, or other external tie.
The society at Brook Farm existed, I think, about six or seven years,
and then broke up, the Farm was sold, and I believe all the partners
came out with pecuniary loss. Some of them had spent on it the
accumulations of years. I suppose they all, at the moment, regarded it
as a failure. I do not think they can so regard it now, but probably
as an important chapter in their experience which has been of lifelong
value. What knowledge of themselves and of each other, what various
practical wisdom, what personal power, what studies of character, what
accumulated culture many of the members owed to it! What mutual measure
they took of each other! It was a close union, like that in a ship’s
cabin, of clergymen, young collegians, merchants, mechanics, farmers’
sons and daughters, with men and women of rare opportunities and
delicate culture, yet assembled there by a sentiment which all shared,
some of them hotly shared, of the honesty of a life of labor and of
the beauty of a life of humanity. The yeoman saw refined manners in
persons who were his friends; and the lady or the romantic scholar saw
the continuous strength and faculty in people who would have disgusted
them but that these powers were now spent in the direction of their own
theory of life.
I recall these few selected facts, none of them of much independent
interest, but symptomatic of the times and country. I please myself
with the thought that our American mind is not now eccentric or rude
in its strength, but is beginning to show a quiet power, drawn from
wide and abundant sources, proper to a Continent and to an educated
people. If I have owed much to the special influences I have indicated,
I am not less aware of that excellent and increasing circle of masters
in arts and in song and in science, who cheer the intellect of our
cities and this country to-day,--whose genius is not a lucky accident,
but normal, and with broad foundation of culture, and so inspires the
hope of steady strength advancing on itself, and a day without night.
THE CHARDON STREET CONVENTION.
THE CHARDON STREET CONVENTION.[11]
IN the month of November, 1840, a Convention of Friends of Universal
Reform assembled in the Chardon Street Chapel in Boston, in obedience
to a call in the newspapers, signed by a few individuals, inviting all
persons to a public discussion of the institutions of the Sabbath,
the Church and the Ministry. The Convention organized itself by
the choice of Edmund Quincy as Moderator, spent three days in the
consideration of the Sabbath, and adjourned to a day in March of the
following year, for the discussion of the second topic. In March,
accordingly, a three-days’ sessions was holden in the same place, on
the subject of the Church, and a third meeting fixed for the following
November, which was accordingly holden; and the Convention debated,
for three days again, the remaining subject of the Priesthood. This
Convention never printed any report of its deliberations, nor pretended
to arrive at any result by the expression of its sense in formal
resolutions;--the professed objects of those persons who felt the
greatest interest in its meetings being simply the elucidation of
truth through free discussion. The daily newspapers reported, at the
time, brief sketches of the course of proceedings, and the remarks
of the principal speakers. These meetings attracted a great deal of
public attention, and were spoken of in different circles in every
note of hope, of sympathy, of joy, of alarm, of abhorrence and of
merriment. The composition of the assembly was rich and various. The
singularity and latitude of the summons drew together, from all parts
of New England and also from the Middle States, men of every shade of
opinion from the straitest orthodoxy to the wildest heresy, and many
persons whose church was a church of one member only. A great variety
of dialect and of costume was noticed; a great deal of confusion,
eccentricity, and freak appeared, as well as of zeal and enthusiasm.
If the assembly was disorderly, it was picturesque. Madmen, madwomen,
men with beards, Dunkers, Muggletonians, Come-outers, Groaners,
Agrarians, Seventh-day-Baptists, Quakers, Abolitionists, Calvinists,
Unitarians and Philosophers,--all came successively to the top, and
seized their moment, if not their hour, wherein to chide, or pray, or
preach, or protest. The faces were a study. The most daring innovators
and the champions-until-death of the old cause sat side by side. The
still-living merit of the oldest New England families, glowing yet
after several generations, encountered the founders of families,
fresh merit, emerging, and expanding the brows to a new breadth,
and lighting a clownish face with sacred fire. The assembly was
characterized by the predominance of a certain plain, sylvan strength
and earnestness, whilst many of the most intellectual and cultivated
persons attended its councils. Dr. Channing, Edward Taylor, Bronson
Alcott, Mr. Garrison, Mr. May, Theodore Parker, H. C. Wright, Dr.
Osgood, William Adams, Edward Palmer, Jones Very, Maria W. Chapman, and
many other persons of a mystical or sectarian or philanthropic renown,
were present, and some of them participant. And there was no want of
female speakers; Mrs. Little and Mrs. Lucy Sessions took a pleasing
and memorable part in the debate, and that flea of Conventions, Mrs.
Abigail Folsom, was but too ready with her interminable scroll. If
there was not parliamentary order, there was life, and the assurance of
that constitutional love for religion and religious liberty which, in
all periods, characterizes the inhabitants of this part of America.
There was a great deal of wearisome speaking in each of those
three-days’ sessions, but relieved by signal passages of pure
eloquence, by much vigor of thought, and especially by the exhibition
of character, and by the victories of character. These men and women
were in search of something better and more satisfying than a vote or
a definition, and they found what they sought, or the pledge of it,
in the attitude taken by individuals of their number of resistance
to the insane routine of parliamentary usage; in the lofty reliance
on principles, and the prophetic dignity and transfiguration which
accompanies, even amidst opposition and ridicule, a man whose mind is
made up to obey the great inward Commander, and who does not anticipate
his own action, but awaits confidently the new emergency for the new
counsel. By no means the least value of this Convention, in our eye,
was the scope it gave to the genius of Mr. Alcott, and not its least
instructive lesson was the gradual but sure ascendency of his spirit,
in spite of the incredulity and derision with which he is at first
received, and in spite, we might add, of his own failures. Moreover,
although no decision was had, and no action taken on all the great
points mooted in the discussion, yet the Convention brought together
many remarkable persons, face to face, and gave occasion to memorable
interviews and conversations, in the hall, in the lobbies, or around
the doors.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 11: _The Dial_, vol. iii., p. 100.]
EZRA RIPLEY, D. D.
WE love the venerable house
Our fathers built to God:
In Heaven are kept their grateful vows,
Their dust endears the sod.
From humble tenements around
Came up the pensive train
And in the church a blessing found
That filled their homes again.
EZRA RIPLEY, D. D.[12]
EZRA RIPLEY was born May 1, 1751 (O. S.), at Woodstock, Connecticut.
He was the fifth of the nineteen children of Noah and Lydia (Kent)
Ripley. Seventeen of these nineteen children married, and it is stated
that the mother died leaving nineteen children, one hundred and two
grandchildren and ninety-six great-grandchildren. The father was born
at Hingham, on the farm purchased by his ancestor, William Ripley,
of England, at the first settlement of the town; which farm has been
occupied by seven or eight generations. Ezra Ripley followed the
business of farming till sixteen years of age, when his father wished
him to be qualified to teach a grammar school, not thinking himself
able to send one son to college without injury to his other children.
With this view, the father agreed with the late Rev. Dr. Forbes of
Gloucester, then minister of North Brookfield, to fit Ezra for college
by the time he should be twenty-one years of age, and to have him labor
during the time sufficiently to pay for his instruction, clothing and
books.
But, when fitted for college, the son could not be contented with
teaching, which he had tried the preceding winter. He had early
manifested a desire for learning, and could not be satisfied without a
public education. Always inclined to notice ministers, and frequently
attempting, when only five or six years old, to imitate them by
preaching, now that he had become a professor of religion he had an
ardent desire to be a preacher of the gospel. He had to encounter great
difficulties, but, through a kind providence and the patronage of Dr.
Forbes, he entered Harvard University, July, 1772. The commencement of
the Revolutionary War greatly interrupted his education at college.
In 1775, in his senior year, the college was removed from Cambridge
to this town. The studies were much broken up. Many of the students
entered the army, and the class never returned to Cambridge. There were
an unusually large number of distinguished men in this class of 1776:
Christopher Gore, Governor of Massachusetts and Senator in Congress;
Samuel Sewall, Chief Justice of Massachusetts; George Thacher, Judge of
the Supreme Court; Royall Tyler, Chief Justice of Vermont; and the late
learned Dr. Prince, of Salem.
Mr. Ripley was ordained minister of Concord November 7, 1778. He
married, November 16, 1780, Mrs. Phebe (Bliss) Emerson, then a widow of
thirty-nine, with five children. They had three children: Samuel, born
May 11, 1783; Daniel Bliss, born August 1, 1784; Sarah, born April 8,
1789. He died September 21, 1841.
To these facts, gathered chiefly from his own diary, and stated nearly
in his own words, I can only add a few traits from memory.
He was identified with the ideas and forms of the New England Church,
which expired about the same time with him, so that he and his coevals
seemed the rear guard of the great camp and army of the Puritans,
which, however in its last days declining into formalism, in the heyday
of its strength had planted and liberated America. It was a pity that
his old meeting-house should have been modernized in his time. I am
sure all who remember both will associate his form with whatever was
grave and droll in the old, cold, unpainted, uncarpeted square-pewed
meeting-house, with its four iron-gray deacons in their little box
under the pulpit,--with Watts’s hymns, with long prayers, rich with the
diction of ages; and not less with the report like musketry from the
movable seats. He and his contemporaries, the old New England clergy,
were believers in what is called a particular providence,--certainly,
as they held it, a very particular providence,--following the
narrowness of King David and the Jews, who thought the universe existed
only or mainly for their church and congregation. Perhaps I cannot
better illustrate this tendency than by citing a record from the
diary of the father of his predecessor,[13] the minister of Malden,
written in the blank leaves of the almanac for the year 1735. The
minister writes against January 31st: “Bought a shay for 27 pounds,
10 shillings. The Lord grant it may be a comfort and blessing to my
family.” In March following he notes: “Had a safe and comfortable
journey to York.” But April 24th, we find: “Shay overturned, with
my wife and I in it, yet neither of us much hurt. Blessed be our
gracious Preserver. Part of the shay, as it lay upon one side, went
over my wife, and yet she was scarcely anything hurt. How wonderful
the preservation.” Then again, May 5th: “Went to the beach with three
of the children. The beast, being frightened when we were all out
of the shay, overturned and broke it. I desire (I hope I desire it)
that the Lord would teach me suitably to repent this Providence, to
make suitable remarks on it, and to be suitably affected with it.
Have I done well to get me a shay? Have I not been proud or too fond
of this convenience? Do I exercise the faith in the Divine care and
protection which I ought to do? Should I not be more in my study and
less fond of diversion? Do I not withhold more than is meet from pious
and charitable uses?” Well, on 15th May we have this: “Shay brought
home; mending cost thirty shillings. Favored in this respect beyond
expectation.” 16th May: “My wife and I rode together to Rumney Marsh.
The beast frighted several times.” And at last we have this record,
June 4th: “Disposed of my shay to Rev. Mr. White.”
The same faith made what was strong and what was weak in Dr. Ripley
and his associates. He was a perfectly sincere man, punctual, severe,
but just and charitable, and if he made his forms a strait-jacket
to others, he wore the same himself all his years. Trained in this
church, and very well qualified by his natural talent to work in it,
it was never out of his mind. He looked at every person and thing from
the parochial point of view. I remember, when a boy, driving about
Concord with him, and in passing each house he told the story of the
family that lived in it, and especially he gave me anecdotes of the
nine church members who had made a division in the church in the time
of his predecessor, and showed me how every one of the nine had come
to bad fortune or to a bad end. His prayers for rain and against the
lightning, “that it may not lick up our spirits;” and for good weather;
and against sickness and insanity; “that we have not been tossed to and
fro until the dawning of the day, that we have not been a terror to
ourselves and others;” are well remembered, and his own entire faith
that these petitions were not to be overlooked, and were entitled to a
favorable answer. Some of those around me will remember one occasion of
severe drought in this vicinity, when the late Rev. Mr. Goodwin offered
to relieve the Doctor of the duty of leading in prayer; but the Doctor
suddenly remembering the season, rejected his offer with some humor,
as with an air that said to all the congregation, “This is no time for
you young Cambridge men; the affair, sir, is getting serious. I will
pray myself.” One August afternoon, when I was in his hayfield helping
him with his man to rake up his hay, I well remember his pleading,
almost reproachful looks at the sky, when the thunder gust was coming
up to spoil his hay. He raked very fast, then looked at the cloud, and
said, “We are in the Lord’s hand; mind your rake, George! We are in the
Lord’s hand;” and seemed to say, “You know me; this field is mine,--Dr.
Ripley’s,--thine own servant!”
He used to tell the story of one of his old friends, the minister
of Sudbury, who, being at the Thursday lecture in Boston, heard the
officiating clergyman praying for rain. As soon as the service was
over, he went to the petitioner, and said, “You Boston ministers, as
soon as a tulip wilts under your windows, go to church and pray for
rain, until all Concord and Sudbury are under water.” I once rode with
him to a house at Nine Acre Corner to attend the funeral of the father
of a family. He mentioned to me on the way his fears that the oldest
son, who was now to succeed to the farm, was becoming intemperate.
We presently arrived, and the Doctor addressed each of the mourners
separately: “Sir, I condole with you.” “Madam, I condole with you.”
“Sir, I knew your great-grandfather. When I came to this town, your
great-grandfather was a substantial farmer in this very place, a member
of the church, and an excellent citizen. Your grandfather followed him,
and was a virtuous man. Now your father is to be carried to his grave,
full of labors and virtues. There is none of that large family left but
you, and it rests with you to bear up the good name and usefulness of
your ancestors. If you fail, Ichabod, the glory is departed. Let us
pray.” Right manly he was, and the manly thing he could always say. I
can remember a little speech he made to me, when the last tie of blood
which held me and my brothers to his house was broken by the death of
his daughter. He said, on parting, “I wish you and your brothers to
come to this house as you have always done. You will not like to be
excluded; I shall not like to be neglected.”
When “Put” Merriam, after his release from the state prison, had the
effrontery to call on the doctor as an old acquaintance, in the midst
of general conversation Mr. Frost came in, and the doctor presently
said, “Mr. Merriam, my brother and colleague, Mr. Frost, has come to
take tea with me. I regret very much the causes (which you know very
well) which make it impossible for me to ask you to stay and break
bread with us.” With the Doctor’s views it was a matter of religion to
say thus much. He had a reverence and love of society, and the patient,
continuing courtesy, carrying out every respectful attention to the
end, which marks what is called the manners of the old school. His
hospitality obeyed Charles Lamb’s rule, and “ran fine to the last.” His
partiality for ladies was always strong, and was by no means abated by
time. He claimed privilege of years, was much addicted to kissing;
spared neither maid, wife, nor widow, and, as a lady thus favored
remarked to me, “seemed as if he was going to make a meal of you.”
He was very credulous, and as he was no reader of books or journals, he
knew nothing beyond the columns of his weekly religious newspaper, the
tracts of his sect, and perhaps the Middlesex Yeoman. He was the easy
dupe of any tonguey agent, whether colonizationist or anti-papist, or
charlatan of iron combs, or tractors, or phrenology, or magnetism, who
went by. At the time when Jack Downing’s letters were in every paper,
he repeated to me at table some of the particulars of that gentleman’s
intimacy with General Jackson, in a manner that betrayed to me at once
that he took the whole for fact. To undeceive him, I hastened to recall
some particulars to show the absurdity of the thing, as the Major and
the President going out skating on the Potomac, etc. “Why,” said the
Doctor with perfect faith, “it was a bright moonlight night;” and I
am not sure that he did not die in the belief in the reality of Major
Downing. Like other credulous men, he was opinionative, and, as I well
remember, a great browbeater of the poor old fathers who still survived
from the 19th of April, to the end that they should testify to his
history as he had written it.
He was a man so kind and sympathetic, his character was so transparent,
and his merits so intelligible to all observers, that he was very
justly appreciated in this community. He was a natural gentleman, no
dandy, but courtly, hospitable, manly and public-spirited; his nature
social, his house open to all men. We remember the remark made by the
old farmer who used to travel hither from Maine, that no horse from
the Eastern country would go by the doctor’s gate. Travellers from the
West and North and South bear the like testimony. His brow was serene
and open to his visitor, for he loved men, and he had no studies, no
occupations, which company could interrupt. His friends were his study,
and to see them loosened his talents and his tongue. In his house
dwelt order and prudence and plenty. There was no waste and no stint.
He was open-handed and just and generous. Ingratitude and meanness in
his beneficiaries did not wear out his compassion; he bore the insult,
and the next day his basket for the beggar, his horse and chaise for
the cripple, were at their door. Though he knew the value of a dollar
as well as another man, yet he loved to buy dearer and sell cheaper
than others. He subscribed to all charities, and it is no reflection
on others to say that he was the most public-spirited man in the town.
The late Dr. Gardiner, in a funeral sermon on some parishioner whose
virtues did not readily come to mind, honestly said, “He was good at
fires.” Dr. Ripley had many virtues, and yet all will remember that
even in his old age, if the fire-bell was rung, he was instantly on
horseback with his buckets and bag.
He showed even in his fireside discourse traits of that pertinency
and judgment, softening ever and anon into elegancy, which make the
distinction of the scholar, and which, under better discipline, might
have ripened into a Bentley or a Porson. He had a foresight, when he
opened his mouth, of all that he would say, and he marched straight to
the conclusion. In debate in the vestry of the Lyceum, the structure of
his sentences was admirable; so neat, so natural, so terse, his words
fell like stones; and often, though quite unconscious of it, his speech
was a satire on the loose, voluminous, draggle-tail periods of other
speakers. He sat down when he had done. A man of anecdote, his talk in
the parlor was chiefly narrative. We remember the remark of a gentleman
who listened with much delight to his conversation at the time when the
Doctor was preparing to go to Baltimore and Washington, that “a man who
could tell a story so well was company for kings and John Quincy Adams.”