Mrs. Ripley was in complete accord with her husband on all vital questions, and as the chief of the Wash-Room Group worked blithely eight or ten hours a day. Whether this devotion to her husband's ideals grew out of her love for him, or whether she was really persuaded of the truth of his theory, does not appear. In later life it is interesting to learn that she sought in the Church of Rome the comfort which Ripley's transcendentalism was not able to afford her. When she died in 1859 she had held the faith of Rome for nearly a dozen years, and, curiously enough, was buried as a Catholic from that very building in which her husband had preached as a Unitarian early in their married life, the church having in the interim been purchased by the Catholics. With just one glimpse of the later Ripley himself, we must leave this interesting couple. In 1866, when, armed with a letter of introduction from Emerson, the original Brook Farmer sought Carlyle (who had once described him as "a Socinian minister who had left his pulpit to reform the world by cultivating onions"), and Carlyle greeted him with a long and violent tirade against our government, Ripley sat quietly through it all, but when the sage of Chelsea paused for breath, calmly rose and left the house, saying no word of remonstrance.
It is, of course, however, in Hawthorne and his descriptions in the "Blithedale Romance" of the life at Brook Farm that the principal interest of most readers centres. This work has come to be regarded as the epic of the community, and it is now generally conceded that Hawthorne was in this novel far more of a realist than was at first admitted. He did not avoid the impulse to tell the happenings of life at the farm pretty nearly as he found them, and substantial as the characters may or may not be, the daily life and doings, the scenery, the surroundings, and even trivial details are presented with a well-nigh faultless accuracy.
The characters, as I have said, are not easily traceable, but even in this respect Hawthorne was something of a photographer. Zenobia seems a blend of Margaret Fuller and of Mrs. Barlow, who as Miss Penniman was once a famous Brookline beauty of lively and attractive disposition. In the strongest and most repellant character of the novel, Hollingsworth, Hawthorne seems to have incorporated something of the fierce earnestness of Brownson and the pathetic zeal of Ripley. And those who best know Brook Farm are able to find in the book reflections of other well-known members of the community. For the actual life of the place, however, readers cannot do better than peruse Lindsay Swift's recent delightful work, "Brook Farm, Its Members, Scholars, and Visitors."