Complete and unabridged, with 57 full-page plates by Edvard Munch, Thomas Gainsborough and Peter Monamy. A minor poet joins a farming commune of high-minded reformers and finds himself watching, rather than living — a magnetic agitator, a woman who worships him, and a girl with a secret nobody will discuss. Hawthorne had spent seven months at Brook Farm shoveling manure and losing his investment; he insisted the book was not about it, which convinced nobody. The narrator's coldness is the real subject. Fifty-seven plates by painters including Munch and Millet follow the book's own seasons of farm labor and cold northern light.