, 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
with in our past life, and were pretty well agreed as to the
inexpediency of lumbering along with the old system any further. As to
what should be substituted, there was much less unanimity. We did not
greatly care--at least, I never did--for the written constitution under
which our millennium had commenced. My hope was, that, between theory
and practice, a true and available mode of life might be struck out;
and that, even should we ultimately fail, the months or years spent in
the trial would not have been wasted, either as regarded passing
enjoyment, or the experience which makes men wise.

Arcadians though we were, our costume bore no resemblance to the
beribboned doublets, silk breeches and stockings, and slippers fastened
with artificial roses, that distinguish the pastoral people of poetry
and the stage. In outward show, I humbly conceive, we looked rather
like a gang of beggars, or banditti, than either a company of honest
laboring-men, or a conclave of philosophers. Whatever might be our
points of difference, we all of us seemed to have come to Blithedale
with the one thrifty and laudable idea of wearing out our old clothes.
Such garments as had an airing, whenever we strode afield! Coats with
high collars and with no collars, broad-skirted or swallow-tailed, and
with the waist at every point between the hip and arm-pit; pantaloons
of a dozen successive epochs, and greatly defaced at the knees by the
humiliations of the wearer before his lady-love,--in short, we were a
living epitome of defunct fashions, and the very raggedest presentment
of men who had seen better days. It was gentility in tatters. Often
retaining a scholarlike or clerical air, you might have taken us for
the denizens of Grub Street, intent on getting a comfortable livelihood
by agricultural labor; or Coleridge's projected Pantisocracy in full
experiment; or Candide and his motley associates at work in their
cabbage garden; or anything else that was miserably out at elbows, and
most clumsily patched in the rear. We might