John Harrison Wilson, The life of Charles Henry Dana

[48] most effective. Dana was at that time a very young man, with the faults, but with all the splendor and promise, of youth. No one has criticized the fidelity of his work at the school, and no one, not excepting Ripley, spoke more fervidly than Dana in the cause of association. He was wise, if not wholly ingenuous, for he had the sagacity, at the meeting held in December, 1843, to advocate a continuance of associationism for Brook Farm, while the followers of Brisbane, bringer of huge programmes and unnumbered woes, proclaimed the virtues of modified Fourierism. Dana lost the toss, but did not forsake the field. On the contrary, even after the flames of the Phalanstery swelt up vertically the holes of five years, he still valiantly preached the faith delivered to the saints.

As a mature man the great editor found so few causes on which he could lavish his vanishing enthusiasm that it is a pleasure to recall his scrupulous adhesion to the doctrines of association until those doctrines became normally merged into vaster and more immediate problems. His name ranks in importance with Orvis and Allen as a lecturer, although he probably did not, so often as they, address the public. But when he talked he was influential. On the platform Dana had no especial fluency, but he did have the compensating graces of frankness and a natural manner. On one occasion he defended, and most honestly, ambition as “the greatest of the four social passions.” This it was, the speaker argued, which brought the associates together in order to better social conditions. It corresponds to the seventh note of music, requiring for completeness the striking of the eighth note, which belongs also to the octave beyond. To strike these notes is to arrive at a final object, the higher unity. Noble and straightforward sentiments, but born, one would hardly think, of that “mordaunt and luminous spirit,” as Dana was afterwards remembered. In Dana, however, there were memories, some of them tender, for these sincerer days. Dana, who wore no emotions on his sleeve, never forgot, and never in word, however much in conduct, repudiated Brook Farm. No abler or more sympathetic tribute has ever been paid to the association than was spoken by him at the University