, 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 be-ribboned
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 armpit; 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 have been sworn comrades to
Falstaff's ragged regiment. Little skill as we boasted in other points of
husbandry, every mother's son of us would have served admirably to stick up for
a scarecrow. And the worst of the matter was, that the first energetic movement,
essential to one downright stroke of real labor, was sure to put a finish to
these poor habiliments. So we gradually flung them all aside, and took to honest
homespun and linsey-woolsey, as preferable, on the whole, to the plan
recommended, I think, by Virgil - Ara nudus; sere nudus - which, as Silas Foster
remarked when I translated the maxim, would be apt to astonish the women-folks.
    After a reasonable training
