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Brooke (STOPFORD AUGUSTUS an English)

STOPFORD AUGUSTUS, an English Unitarian preacher, born in Donegal in 1832.

He was educated at Trinity College, Dublin. He has held important curacies in London, and in 1872 was appointed Chaplain in Ordinary to the Queen. He subsequently became a Unitarian. He has p published "Life and Letters of Frederick W. Robertson," "Theology in the English Poets," ," "Primer of English, Literature," and "The Early Life of Jesus." "Treasury of Irish Poetry" (1901); "On ten Plays of Shakespeare" (1905); "Onward Cry" (1911); "Ten More Plays of Shakespeare" (1913). He died in 1916. a BROOK FARM ASSOCIATION, community which originated in 1841, with William Henry Channing, George Ripley, and Sophia, his wife, with whom were united from time to time George William Curtis, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Theodore Parker, Charles Anderson Dana, John Sullivan Dwight, Margaret Fuller, and other personages of a philosopr sophic turn of mind. It started as an expression of the transcendentalism then attracting philosophical minds in the region of Boston, and as a suggestion from the Fourier communistic movement in Europe. The dominating idea of the Brook Farm experiment was liberty; it was a practical protest against the long dominant Calvinism. An organization was formed, having those named and others as stockholders, and a farm of 200 acres was purchased in West Roxbury, 8 miles from Boston, where the Transcendentalists who adopted its main principle carried it into practice by working the land to the best of their ability and knowledge, which, however, were limited. That it ceased to exist, after five or six years, was due to the utterly unpractical natures of those engaged in the enterprise, which was finally abandoned after having been a financial failure from the beginning. The scheme of the association contemplated utilizing the labor-physically and intellectually-of each of its members, at a certain fixed rate, the intention being to dispose of the results of such labor to the outside public, and with such profit that all the delights and adornments of life were to be procurable therefrom, and were to be held in common by the members of the association. The whole undertaking was brought to a collapse by the destruction of the "Phalanstery" at Brook Farm, by fire, on the night of March 3, 1846.