Emerging into the genial sunshine, I half fancied that the labors of the brotherhood had already realized some of Fourier’s predictions.  Their enlightened culture of the soil, and the virtues with which they sanctified their life, had begun to produce an effect upon the material

world and its climate.  In my new enthusiasm, man looked strong and stately,—­and woman, oh, how beautiful!—­and the earth a green garden, blossoming with many-colored delights.  Thus Nature, whose laws I had broken in various artificial ways, comported herself towards me as a strict but loving mother, who uses the rod upon her little boy for his naughtiness, and then gives him a smile, a kiss, and some pretty playthings to console the urchin for her severity.

In the interval of my seclusion, there had been a number of recruits to our little army of saints and martyrs.  They were mostly individuals who had gone through such an experience as to disgust them with ordinary pursuits, but who were not yet so old, nor had suffered so deeply, as to lose their faith in the better time to come.  On comparing their minds one with another they often discovered that this idea of a Community had been growing up, in silent and unknown sympathy, for years.  Thoughtful, strongly lined faces were among them; sombre brows, but eyes that did not require spectacles, unless prematurely dimmed by the student’s lamplight, and hair that seldom showed a thread of silver.  Age, wedded to the past, incrusted over with a stony layer of habits, and retaining nothing fluid in its possibilities, would have been absurdly out of place in an enterprise like this.  Youth, too, in its early dawn, was hardly more adapted to our purpose; for it would behold the morning radiance of its own spirit beaming over the very same spots of withered grass and barren sand whence most of us had seen it vanish.  We had very young people with us, it is true,—­downy lads, rosy girls in their first teens, and children of all heights above one’s knee; but these had chiefly been sent hither for education, which it was one of the objects and methods of our institution to supply.  Then we had boarders, from town and elsewhere, who lived with us in a familiar way, sympathized more or less in our theories, and sometimes shared in our labors.

On the whole, it was a society such as has seldom met together; nor, perhaps, could it reasonably be expected to hold together long.  Persons of marked individuality—­crooked sticks, as some of us might be called—­are not exactly the easiest to bind up into a fagot.  But, so long as our union should subsist, a man of intellect and feeling, with a free nature in him, might have sought far and near without finding so many points of attraction as would allure him hitherward.  We were of all creeds and opinions, and generally tolerant of all, on every imaginable subject.  Our bond, it seems to me, was not affirmative, but negative.  We had individually found one thing or another to quarrel