 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 faggot. 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 farther. As to what
should be substituted, there was much less unanimity. We did not greatly care -
at least
