essentially a day-dream, and yet a fact, and thus offering an available foothold between fiction and reality. Furthermore, the scene was in good keeping with the personages whom he desired to introduce. These characters, he feels it right to say, are entirely fictitious. It would, indeed (considering how few amiable qualities he distributes among his imaginary progeny), be a most grievous wrong to his former excellent associates, were the author to allow it to be supposed that he has been sketching any of their likenesses. Had he attempted it, they would at least have recognized the touches of a friendly pencil. But he has done nothing of the kind. The self-concentrated Philanthropist; the high-spirited Woman, bruising herself against the narrow limitations of her sex; the weakly Maiden, whose tremulous nerves endow her with sibylline attributes; the Minor Poet, beginning life with strenuous aspirations, which die out with his youthful fervor; -all these might have been looked for at BROOK FARM, but, by some accident never made their appearance there. The author cannot close his reference to this subjcct, without expressing a most earnest wish that some one of the many cultivated and philosophic minds, which took an interest in that enterprise, might now give the world its history. Ripley, with whom rests the honorable paternity of the institution -- Dana, Dwight, Channing, Burton, Parker, for instance, with others, whom he dares not name, because they veil themselves from the public eye,— among these is the ability to convey both the outward narrative and the inner truth and spirit of the whole affair, together with the lessons which those years of thought and toil must have elaborated, for the behoof of future experimentalists. Even the brilliant How adji might find as rich a theme in his youthful reminiscences of BROOK FARM, and a more novel one, close at hand as it lies, than those which be has since made so distant a pilgrimage to scek, in Syria and along the current of the Nile. CONCORD 'Mass.), MAY, 1852. THE BLITIEDALE ROMANCE. I. OLD MOODIE. THE evening before my departure for Blithedale, I was returning to my bachelor apartments, after attending the wonderful exhibition of the Veiled Lady, when an elderly man, of rather shabby appearance, met me in an obscure part of the street. "Mr. Coverdale," said he, softly, "can I speak with you a moment?" As I have casually alluded to the Veiled Lady, it may not be amiss to mention, for the benefit of such of my eaders as are unacquainted with her now forgotten celebrity, that she was a phenomenon in the mesmeric line; one of the earliest that had indicated the birth of a new science, or the revival of an old humbug. Since those times, her sisterhood have grown too numerous to attract much individual notice; nor, in fact, has any one of them ever come before the public under such skilfully contrived circumstances of stage-effect as those which at once mystified and illuminated the remarkable performances of the lady in question. Now-a-days, in ɩne management of his "subject," "clairvoyant," or "medium," the exhibitor affects the simplicity and openness |