Author: Robert D. Richardson In “Three Roads Back,” Robert Richardson, the author of magisterial biographies of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and William James, tells the connected stories of how these foundational American writers and thinkers dealt with personal tragedies early in their careers. For Emerson, it was the death of his young wife and, 11 years later,
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Chasing a painterâs long-lost rainbow at Brook Farm
By Murray Whyte Globe Staff,Updated January 28, 2021, 11:41 a.m.
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Josiah Wolcott s Brook Farm With Rainbow, painted in 1845.Collection of the Massachusetts Historical Society
WEST ROXBURY â Thereâs no farm to be found at Brook Farm, a tangle of footpaths and untended forest, marsh, and brush tucked into a corner of West Roxbury. Its shambling 179 acres are surrounded, quite literally, by a sea of headstones from a pair of cemeteries that bookend it north to south. Its trails are favorites of dog walkers, I learned on a recent chilly morning. (I counted at least a dozen over an hourlong ramble.) But the land itself tells no tales. All youâll see is one lonely, peaked-roof building just off Baker Street, right across from the cemetery administrative office. It was built by a Lutheran group years after the nominal farm disbanded, a faint echo of the rich history long since returned to the eart