James T. Fields, the publisher, said of him, "He was
a man who had, so to speak, a physical affinity with solitude." He
could not put his mind to his special work. The seclusion in which he
had worked before, he could not find, and though "no one intruded on
him," as he says, yet he was not in his best element.
Had he stayed longer, this newness of situation would doubtless have
worn off, and he would have found a seclusion little dreamed of at
first acquaintance with the life. He was in haste to be at his writing;
so after a few months of manual labor, bidding adieu to the farm, he
found himself back in Boston. There were other interests that carried
him there, for we find that in the next year he married Sophia Peabody
of Salem, Mass. Critics have said that the Brook Farm life was hurtful
to his genius. He never once intimated it, but said afterwards to
Emerson that he was "almost sorry he did not stay with the Brook
Farmers and see it out to the finish."
The most ingenuous, the most simple-minded of all men in matters of
ordinary business, in relative values and exchanges, and unwilling to
act as teacher, he could only be counted as an ordinary day-laborer,
except where he could use the twin gifts of intellect and imagination
with which he was so highly endowed.
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