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