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The high ideal they carried as their standard lifted them over many of the littlenesses and annoyances of daily life without a disturbing thought. I find in the Harbinger of December 20, 1845, one of the very few special allusions to Brook Farm life, and it is so much to the point that I copy it entire:
She might not wonder, but she must sigh that her father should feel no degradation in his change, should see nothing to regret in the duties and dignity of the resident landholder, should find so much to be vain of in the littlenesses of a town; and she must sigh, and smile, and wonder too, as Elizabeth threw open the folding-doors and walked with exultation from one drawing-room to the other, boasting of their space; at the possibility of that woman, who had been mistress of Kellynch Hall, finding extent to be proud of between two walls, perhaps thirty feet asunder.
To everything that I said of him, one of those that praise him sky-high would always answer, 'He knows how to love! People are always telling me that Montriveau would give up all for his friend; that his is a great nature. Pooh! society does not want such tremendous natures. Men of that stamp are all very well at home; let them stay there and leave us to our pleasant littlenesses.
Neither the King, the Ministry, or its supporters appeared to appreciate that, even in an age when public opinion was chaotic and often hardly audible, there must come a time when a day of reckoning was certain for a Government which had discredited and injured its country. We see the apprehensions, the personal expectations, the littlenesses of political society.
The forest was a great treadmill in which men toiled all day, only to be surrounded at night by the same grandeurs and littlenesses they had that morning left. In the face of this apparent futility time blew vast. Years were as nothing measured by the task of breaking through the enchanted web that enmeshed them.
The experiences of many men, in reference to the same spots in the same years, months, and even hours, are gathered, collated, and compared; and the result is, that although there are conflicting elements and contradictory appearances, order has been discovered in the midst of apparent confusion, and scientific men have been enabled to pierce through the chaos of littlenesses by which the world's vision has been hitherto obscured, and to lay bare many of those grand progressions of nature which move unvaryingly with stately step through space and time, as the river, with all its minor eddies and counter-currents, flows with unvarying regularity to the ocean.
The meannesses, the littlenesses, the perplexities, the general irksomeness of life, weigh upon me strangely. Thou didst refuse to drink with me. That being the case, methinks I could break the jewelled goblet now, untasted, and choose the grave as the wiser part." "The beautiful goblet! What a pity to break it!" said Sibyl, with her characteristic malign and mysterious smile.
What he knows is undigested and chaotic, while his appearance makes you expect more of him than he can give hence disappointment. Our society is yet in knickerbockers, and has retained all sorts of littlenesses and prejudices which older civilizations have long since relegated to the mental lumber room.
The homely test by which he would determine that the maiden should be pointed out to him, the glimpse of old-world ways at the well, the gracious courtesy of the fair damsel, and the simple devoutness of the speaker, who recognises in what to others were trivial commonplaces God's guidance to the end which He had appointed, his recognition of the divine hand moving beneath all the nothings and littlenesses of daily life may teach us much.
Mothers are great in the eyes of their sons because they are knit in our minds with all the littlenesses of life, the unspeakably dear trifles and odds of existence. The other day I found in my desk a little strip of tape on which my name was marked a dozen times in drawing ink, in my mother's familiar script.
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