ht we could acquire
upon the portent, and would gladly, now that it has done its office,
erase its deep print out of our own brain, where long meditation has
fixt it in very undesirable distinctness.

III

OF LIFE AT BROOK FARM[78]

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.

[Footnote 78: From "The Blithedale Romance," published by Houghton,
Mifflin Company. Hawthorne was a member of the Brook Farm Community of
Roxbury, Mass., and from it derived at least suggestions for the scene
and action of this story.]

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 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 practise, 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 tho 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 l