Some months ago, in Tremont Temple, I listened with much pleasure, to the reference to the Transcendentalist made by our First Reader. The history of the Transcendentalists, as they were called, with their deep religious convictions and their earnest desires for a higher and more spiritual life, as shown to the world by their experiment at Brook Farm, is most interesting to me.
Referring to Tremont Temple our First Reader said. "Not far from the ground whereon it stands much vital history has been made. ... Here William Ellery Channing preached a better gospel than early Puritanism had grasped, for he proclaimed a God of Love. Here Emerson and Parker preached a yet broader gospel than Charming. Here Alcott, Emerson, the Channings, and others taught on a plane so high above the general comprehension of their time, that they were accounted Transcendentalists."
About a mile from my home in West Roxbury, and seven miles from the centre of Boston, is a beautiful estate which is visited every summer by many intelligent and thoughtful people from far and near. This estate, now a Lutheran Home for children, is known as Brook Farm. As we approach it from West Roxbury, walking along a pretty country road, we cross a bridge over a noisy little brook, that tumbles out between birch and willow trees, from the broad meadows beyond, and come to a large, brown, wooden house which looms bare and barn-like above the grassy terraces and among the stately elms that surround it. Near this building is another, smaller, but similar in structure. Stretching out before these buildings, beyond the little brook, are acres of rich fields and rolling meadows, which finally disappear in a dense pine grove in the background.
