Isaac Hecker was never an actual member of that inner community of whose aspirations and convictions the Farm was intended as an embodiment. He entered at first as a partial boarder, paying four dollars a week, and undertaking also the bread-making, which until then had been very badly done, as he writes to his mother. It should be understood that whatever was received from any inmate, either in money or labor, was accepted not as a mere return for food and shelter, but as an equivalent for such instruction as could be imparted by any other member of the collective family. And there were many competent and brilliant men and women there, whose attainments not only qualified them amply for the tasks they then assumed, but have since made them prominent in American letters and journalism. Mr. Ripley lectured on modern philosophy to all who desired an acquaintance with Spinoza, Kant, Cousin, and their compeers. George P. Bradford was a thorough classical scholar. Charles A. Dana, then fresh from Harvard, was an enthusiast for German literature, and successful in imparting both knowledge and enthusiasm to his pupils. There were classes in almost everything that any one cared to study. French and music, as we learn from one of Isaac's letters home, were what he set himself to at the first. The latter was taught by so accomplished a master as John S. Dwight, who conducted weekly singing-schools for both children and adults.
To what other studies Isaac may have applied himself we hardly know. It will be noticed that Mr. George William Curtis, in the kindly reminiscences which he permits us to embody in this chapter, says that he does not remember him as "especially studious." The remark tallies with the impression we have gathered from the journal kept while he was there. His mind was introverted. Philosophical questions, then as always, interested him profoundly, but only in so far as they led to practical results. It might be truer to say that philosophy was at no time more than the handmaid of theology to him. At this period he was in the thick of his struggle to attain certainty with regard to the nature and extent of the Christian revelation, and what he sought at Brook Farm was the leisure and quiet and opportunity for solitude which could not be his at home. "Lead me into Thy holy Church, which I now am seeking," he writes as the final petition of the prayer with which the first bulky volume of his diary opens. With the burden of that search upon him, it was not possible for such a nature as his to plunge with the unreserve which is the condition of success into any study which had no direct reference to it. We find him complaining at frequent intervals that he cannot give his studies the attention they demand. Nor were his labors as the community baker of long continuance. They left him too little time at his own disposal, and in a short time he became a full boarder, and occupied himself only as his inclinations directed.