 | Mosses from an old manse |  |
MOSSES FROM AN OLD MANSE.
THE NEW ADAM AND EVE.
We, who are born into the world's artificial system, can never
adequately know how little in our present state and circumstances
is natural, and how much is merely the interpolation of the perverted
mind and heart of man. Art has become a second and
stronger Nature; she is a step-mother, whose crafty tenderness
has taught us to despise the bountiful and wholesome ministrations
of our true parent. It is only through the medium of the
imagination that we can lessen those iron fetters, which we call
truth and reality, and make ourselves even partially sensible what
prisoners we are. For instance, let us conceive good Father
Miller's interpretation of the prophecies to have proved true. The
Day of Doom has burst upon the globe, and swept away the whole
rece of men. From cities and fields, sea-shore, and mid-land
mountain region, vast continents, and even the remotest islands of
the ocean—each living thing is gone. No breath of a created
being disturbs this earthly atmosphere. But the abodes of man,
and all that he has accomplished, the foot-prints of his wanderings,
and the results of his toil, the visible symbols of his intellectual
cultivation, and moral progress—in short, everything
physical that can give evidence of his present position—shall
remain untouched by the hand of destiny. Then, to inherit and
Adam and a new Eve to have been created, in the full development
of mind and heart, but with no knowledge of their predecessors,
nor of the diseased circumstances that had become encrusted
around them. Such a pair would at once distinguish between
art and nature. Their instincts and intuitions would immediately
recognize the wisdom and simplicity of the latter, while the
former, with its elaborate perversities, would offer them a continual
succession of puzzles.
Let us attempt, in a mood half-sportive and half-thoughtful, to
track these imaginary heirs of our mortality through their first
day's experience. No longer ago than yesterday, the flame of
human life was extinguished; there has been a breathless night;
and now another morn approaches, expecting to find the earth no
less desolate than at eventide.
It is dawn. The east puts on its immemorial blush, although
no human eye is gazing at it; for all the phenomena of the natural
world renew themselves, in spite of the solitude that now
broods around the globe. There is still beauty of earth, sea, and
sky, for beauty's sake. But soon there are to be spectators. Just
when the earliest sunshine gilds earth's mountain tops, two beings
have come into life, not in such an Eden as bloomed to welcome
our first parents, but in the heart of a modern city. They find
themselves in existence, and gazing into one another's eyes.
Their emotion is not astonishment; nor do they perplex themselves
with efforts to discover what, and whence, and why they are.
Each is satisfied to be, because the other exists likewise; and
their first consciousness is of calm and mutual enjoyment, which
seems not to have been the birth of that very moment, but prolonged
from a past eternity. Thus content with an inner sphere which
they inhabit together, it is not immediately that the outward world
can obtrude itself upon their notice.
Soon, however, they feel the invincible necessity of this earthly
that surround them. Perhaps no other stride so vast
remains to be taken, as when they first turn from the reality of
their mutual glance, to the dreams and shadows that perplex them
everywhere else.
“Sweetest Eve, where are we?” exclaims the new Adam,—
for speech, or some equivalent mode of expression, is born with
them, and comes just as natural as breath;—“Methinks I do not
recognize this place.”
“Nor I, dear Adam,” replies the new Eve. “And what a
strange place too! Let me come closer to thy side, and behold
thee only; for all other sights trouble and perplex my spirit.”
“Nay, Eve,” replies Adam, who appears to have the stronger
tendency towards the material world; “it were well that we gain
some insight into these matters. We are in an odd situation
here! Let us look about us.”
Assuredly, there are sights enough to throw the new inheritors
of earth into a state of hopeless perplexity. The long lines of
edifices, their windows glittering in the yellow sunrise, and the
narrow street between, with its barren pavement, tracked and battered
by wheels that have now rattled into an irrevocable past!
The signs, with their unintelligible hieroglyphics! The squareness
and ugliness, and regular or irregular deformity, of everything
that meets the eye! The marks of wear and tear, and unrenewed
decay, which distinguish the works of man from the
growth of nature! What is there in all this, capable of the
slightest significance to minds that know nothing of the artificial
system which is implied in every lamp-post and each brick of the
houses? Moreover, the utter loneliness and silence, in a scene
that originally grew out of noise and bustle, must needs impress a
feeling of desolation even upon Adam and Eve, unsuspicious as
they are of the recent extinction of human existence. In a forest,
solitude would be life; in the city, it is death.
The new Eve looks round with a sensation of doubt and distrust,
such as a city dame, the daughter of numberless generations
of citizens, might experience, if suddenly transported to the
garden of Eden. At length, her downcast eye discovers a small
tuft of grass, just beginning to sprout among the stones of the
pavement; she eagerly grasps it, and is sensible that this little
herb awakens some response within her heart. Nature finds
nothing else to offer her. Adam, after staring up and down the
street, without detecting a single object that his comprehension
can lay hold of, finally turns his forehead to the sky. There,
indeed, is something which the soul within him recognizes.
“Look up yonder, mine own Eve!” he cries; “surely we
ought to dwell among those gold-tinged clouds, or in the blue
depths beyond them. I know not how nor when, but evidently we
have strayed away from our home; for I see nothing hereabouts
that seems to belong to us.”
“Can we not ascend thither?” inquires Eve.
“Why not?” answers Adam, hopefully. “But no! Something
drags us down in spite of our best efforts. Perchance we
may find a path hereafter.”
In the energy of new life, it appears no such impracticable feat
to climb into the sky! But they have already received a woful
lesson, which may finally go far towards reducing them to the
level of the departed race, when they acknowledge the necessity
of keeping the beaten track of earth. They now set forth on a
ramble through the city, in the hope of making their escape from
this uncongenial sphere. Already, in the fresh elasticity of their
spirits they have found the idea of weariness. We will watch
them as they enter some of the shops, and public or private edifices;
for every door, whether of alderman or beggar, church or
hall of state, has been flung wide open by the same agency that
swept away the inmates.
It so happens—and not unluckily for an Adam and Eve who
so happens, that their first visit is to a fashionable dry-good store.
No courteous and importunate attendants hasten to receive their
orders; no throng of ladies are tossing over the rich Parisian
fabrics. All is deserted; trade is at a stand-still; and not even
an echo of the national watchword—“Go ahead!”—disturbs the
quiet of the new customers. But specimens of the latest earthly
fashions, silks of every shade, and whatever is most delicate or
splendid for the decoration of the human form, lie scattered
around, profusely as bright autumnal leaves in a forest. Adam
looks at a few of the articles, but throws them carelessly aside,
with whatever exclamation may correspond to “Pish!” or
“Pshaw!” in the new vocabulary of nature. Eve, however,—
be it said without offence to her native modesty,—examines these
treasures of her sex with somewhat livelier interest. A pair of
corsets chance to lie upon the counter; she inspects them curiously,
but knows not what to make of them. Then she handles
a fashionable silk with dim yearnings—thoughts that wander
hither and thither—instincts groping in the dark.
“On the whole, I do not like it,” she observes, laying the
glossy fabric upon the counter. “But, Adam, it is very strange!
What can these things mean? Surely I ought to know—yet they
put me in a perfect maze!”
“Pooh! my dear Eve, why trouble thy little head about such
nonsense?” cries Adam, in a fit of impatience. “Let us go
somewhere else. But stay! How very beautiful! My loveliest
Eve, what a charm you have imparted to that robe, by merely
throwing it over your shoulders!”
For Eve, with the taste that nature moulded into her composition,
has taken a remnant of exquisite silver gauze and drawn it
around her form, with an effect that gives Adam his first idea of
the witchery of dress. He beholds his spouse in a new light and
with renewed admiration, yet is hardly reconciled to any other
example, he makes free with a mantle of blue velvet, and puts it
on so picturesquely, that it might seem to have fallen from
Heaven upon his stately figure. Thus garbed, they go in search
of new discoveries.
They next wander into a Church, not to make a display of their
fine clothes, but attracted by its spire, pointing upwards to the
sky, whither they have already yearned to climb. As they enter
the portal, a clock, which it was the last earthly act of the sexton
to wind up, repeats the hour in deep and reverberating tones; for
Time has survived his former progeny, and, with the iron tongue
that man gave him, is now speaking to his two grandchildren.
They listen, but understand him not. Nature would measure
time by the succession of thoughts and acts which constitute real
life, and not by hours of emptiness. They pass up the church
aisle, and raise their eyes to the ceiling. Had our Adam and
Eve become mortal in some European city, and strayed into the
vastness and sublimity of an old cathedral, they might have recognized
the purpose for which the deep-souled founders reared
it. Like the dim awfulness of an ancient forest, its very atmosphere
would have incited them to prayer. Within the snug
walls of a metropolitan church there can be no such influence.
Yet some odor of religion is still lingering here, the bequest
of pious souls, who had grace to enjoy a foretaste of immortal
life. Perchance, they breathe a prophecy of a better world to
their successors, who have become obnoxious to all their own
cares and calamities in the present one.
“Eve, something impels me to look upward,” says Adam.
“But it troubles me to see this roof between us and the sky. Let
us go forth, and perhaps we shall discern a Great Face looking
down upon us.”
“Yes; a Great Face, with a beam of love brightening over it,
countenance somewhere!”
They go out of the church, and kneeling at its threshold give
way to the spirit's natural instinct of adoration to a beneficent
Father. But, in truth, their life thus far has been a continual
prayer. Purity and simplicity hold converse, at every moment,
with their Creator.
We now observe them entering a Court of Justice. But what
remotest conception can they attain of the purposes of such an
edifice? How should the idea occur to them, that human brethren,
of like nature with themselves, and originally included in
the same law of love which is their only rule of life, should ever
need an outward enforcement of the true voice within their souls?
And what, save a woful experience, the dark result of many centuries,
could teach them the sad mysteries of crime? Oh, Judgment
Seat, not by the pure in heart wast thou established, nor in
the simplicity of nature; but by hard and wrinkled men, and
upon the accumulated heap of earthly wrong! Thou art the very
symbol of man's perverted state.
On as fruitless an errand our wanderers next visit a Hall of
Legislature, where Adam places Eve in the Speaker's chair, unconscious
of the moral which he thus exemplifies. Man's intellect,
moderated by Woman's tenderness and moral sense! Were
such the legislation of the world, there would be no need of State
Houses, Capitols, Halls of Parliament, nor even of those little
assemblages of patriarchs beneath the shadowy trees, by whom
freedom was first interpreted to mankind on our native shores.
Whither go they next? A perverse destiny seems to perplex
them with one after another of the riddles which mankind put forth
to the wandering universe, and left unsolved in their own destruction.
They enter an edifice of stern grey stone, standing
insulated in the midst of others, and gloomy even in the sunshine,
which it barely suffers to penetrate through its iron-grated windows.
of a stronger authority than the sheriff's. But the prisoners?
Did the messenger of fate, when he shook open all the doors,
respect the magistrate's warrant and the judge's sentence, and
leave the inmates of the dungeons to be delivered by due course of
earthly law? No; a new trial has been granted, in a higher
court, which may set judge, jury, and prisoner at its bar all in a
row, and perhaps find one no less guilty than another. The jail,
like the whole earth, is now a solitude, and has thereby lost something
of its dismal gloom. But here are the narrow cells, like
tombs, only drearier and deadlier, because in these the immortal
spirit was buried with the body. Inscriptions appear on the walls,
scribbled with a pencil, or scratched with a rusty nail; brief
words of agony, perhaps, or guilt's desperate defiance to the world,
or merely a record of a date, by which the writer strove to keep
up with the march of life. There is not a living eye that could
now decipher these memorials.
Nor is it while so fresh from their Creator's hand, that the new
denizens of earth—no, nor their descendants for a thousand years
—could discover that this edifice was a hospital for the direst disease
which could afflict their predecessors. Its patients bore the
outward marks of that leprosy with which all were more or less
infected. They were sick—and so were the purest of their
brethren—with the plague of sin. A deadly sickness, indeed!
Feeling its symptoms within the breast, men concealed it with
fear and shame, and were only the more cruel to those unfortunates
whose pestiferous sores were flagrant to the common eye.
Nothing, save a rich garment, could ever hide the plague-spot.
In the course of the world's lifetime, every remedy was tried for
its cure and extirpation, except the single one, the flower that
grew in Heaven, and was sovereign for all the miseries of earth.
Man never had attempted to cure sin by Love! Had he but
once made the effort, it might well have happened, that there
Adam and Eve have wandered. Hasten forth, with your native
innocence, lest the damps of these still conscious walls infect you
likewise, and thus another fallen race be propagated!
Passing from the interior of the prison into the space within its
outward wall, Adam pauses beneath a structure of the simplest
contrivance, yet altogether unaccountable to him. It consists
merely of two upright posts, supporting a transverse beam, from
which dangles a cord.
“Eve, Eve!” cries Adam, shuddering with a nameless horror.
“What can this thing be?”
“I know not,” answers Eve; “but, Adam, my heart is sick!
There seems to be no more sky!—no more sunshine!”
Well might Adam shudder, and poor Eve be sick at heart; for
this mysterious object was the type of mankind's whole system,
in regard to the great difficulties which God had given to be
solved—a system of fear and vengeance, never successful, yet
followed to the last. Here, on the morning when the final summons
came, a criminal—one criminal, where none were guiltless
—had died upon the gallows. Had the world heard the foot-fall
of its own approaching doom, it would have been no inappropriate
act, thus to close the record of its deeds by one so characteristic.
The two pilgrims now hurry from the prison. Had they
known how the former inhabitants of earth were shut up in artificial
error, and cramped and chained by their perversions, they
might have compared the whole moral world to a prison-house,
and have deemed the removal of the race a general jail-delivery.
They next enter, unannounced—but they might have rung at
the door in vain—a private mansion, one of the stateliest in Beacon
street. A wild and plaintive strain of music is quivering through
the house, now rising like a solemn organ peal, and now dying
into the faintest murmur; as if some spirit, that had felt an
of hall and chamber. Perhaps, a virgin, the purest of
mortal race, has been left behind, to perform a requiem for the
whole kindred of humanity? Not so! These are the tones of
an Æolian harp, through which Nature pours the harmony that
lies concealed in her every breath, whether of summer breeze or
tempest. Adam and Eve are lost in rapture, unmingled with
surprise. The passing wind, that stirred the harp-strings, has been
hushed, before they can think of examining the splendid furniture,
the gorgeous carpets, and the architecture of the rooms.
These things amuse their unpractised eyes, but appeal to nothing
within their hearts. Even the pictures upon the walls scarcely
excite a deeper interest; for there is something radically artificial
and deceptive in painting, with which minds in the primal simplicity
cannot sympathize. The unbidden guests examine a row
of family portraits, but are too dull to recognize them as men and
women, beneath the disguise of a preposterous garb, and with
features and expression debased, because inherited through ages
of moral and physical decay.
Chance, however, presents them with pictures of human beauty,
fresh from the hand of Nature. As they enter a magnificent
apartment, they are astonished, but not affrighted, to perceive two
figures advancing to meet them. Is it not awful to imagine that
any life, save their own, should remain in the wide world?
“How is this?” exclaims Adam. “My beautiful Eve, are
you in two places at once?”
“And you, Adam!” answers Eve, doubtful, yet delighted.
“Surely that noble and lovely form is yours. Yet here you are
by my side! I am content with one—methinks there should not
be two!”
This miracle is wrought by a tall looking-glass, the mystery of
which they soon fathom, because Nature creates a mirror for the
human face in every pool of water, and for her own great features
they now discover the marble statue of a child in a
corner of the room, so exquisitely idealized, that it is almost worthy
to be the prophetic likeness of their first-born. Sculpture, in its
highest excellence, is more genuine than painting, and might
seem to be evolved from a natural germ, by the same law as a
leaf or flower. The statue of the child impresses the solitary
pair as if it were a companion; it likewise hints at secrets both
of the past and future.
“My husband!” whispers Eve.
“What would you say, dearest Eve?” inquires Adam.
“I wonder if we are alone in the world,” she continues, with
a sense of something like fear at the thought of other inhabitants.
“This lovely little form! Did it ever breathe? Or is it only the
shadow of something real, like our pictures in the mirror?”
“It is strange!” replies Adam, pressing his hand to his brow.
“There are mysteries all around us. An idea flits continually
before me—would that I could seize it! Eve, Eve, are we treading
in the footsteps of beings that bore a likeness to ourselves?
If so, whither are they gone?—and why is their world so unfit
for our dwelling-place?”
“Our great Father only knows,” answers Eve. “But something
tells me that we shall not always be alone. And how sweet
if other beings were to visit us in the shape of this fair image!”
Then they wander through the house, and everywhere find
tokens of human life, which now, with the idea recently suggested,
excite a deeper curiosity in their bosoms. Woman has here left
traces of her delicacy and refinement, and of her gentle labors.
Eve ransacks a work-basket, and instinctively thrusts the rosy
tip of her finger into a thimble. She takes up a piece of embroidery,
glowing with mimic flowers, in one of which a fair
damsel of the departed race has left her needle. Pity that the
Day of Doom should have anticipated the completion of such a
A piano-forte has been left open. She flings her hand carelessly
over the keys, and strikes out a sudden melody, no less natural
than the strains of the Æolian harp, but joyous with the dance of
her yet unburthened life. Passing through a dark entry, they
find a broom behind the door; and Eve, who comprises the whole
nature of womanhood, has a dim idea that it is an instrument proper
for her hand. In another apartment they behold a canopied
bed, and all the appliances of luxurious repose. A heap of forest-leaves
would be more to the purpose. They enter the nursery,
and are perplexed with the sight of little gowns and caps, tiny shoes,
and a cradle; amid the drapery of which is still to be seen the impress
of a baby's form. Adam slightly notices these trifles; but
Eve becomes involved in a fit of mute reflection, from which it
is hardly possible to rouse her.
By a most unlucky arrangement, there was to have been a
grand dinner-party in this mansion on the very day when the
whole human family, including the invited guests, were summoned
to the unknown regions of illimitable space. At the moment of
fate, the table was actually spread, and the company on the
point of sitting down. Adam and Eve came unbidden to the banquet;
it has now been some time cold, but otherwise furnishes
them with highly favorable specimens of the gastronomy of their
predecessors. But it is difficult to imagine the perplexity of the
unperverted couple, in endeavoring to find proper food for their
first meal, at a table where the cultivated appetites of a fashionable
party were to have been gratified. Will Nature teach them the
mystery of a plate of turtle soup? Will she embolden them to
attack a haunch of venison? Will she initiate them into the
merits of a Parisian pasty, imported by the last steamer that ever
crossed the Atlantic? Will she not, rather, bid them turn with
disgust from fish, fowl, and flesh, which, to their pure nostrils,
steam with a loathsome odor of death and corruption?—
as such.
Fortunately, however, the dessert is ready upon a neighboring
table. Adam, whose appetite and animal instincts are quicker
than those of Eve, discovers this fitting banquet.
“Here, dearest Eve,” he exclaims, “here is food.”
“Well,” answered she, with the germ of a housewife stirring
within her, “we have been so busy to-day, that a picked-up dinner
must serve.”
So Eve comes to the table, and receives a red-cheeked apple
from her husband's hand, in requital of her predecessor's fatal
gift to our common grandfather. She eats it without sin, and, let
us hope, with no disastrous consequences to her future progeny.
They make a plentiful, yet temperate meal of fruit, which, though
not gathered in Paradise, is legitimately derived from the seeds
that were planted there. Their primal appetite is satisfied.
“What shall we drink, Eve?” inquires Adam.
Eve peeps among some bottles and decanters, which, as they
contain fluids, she naturally conceives must be proper to quench
thirst. But never before did claret, hock, and madeira, of rich
and rare perfume, excite such disgust as now.
“Pah!” she exclaims, after smelling at various wines. “What
stuff is here? The beings who have gone before us could not
have possessed the same nature that we do; for neither their
hunger nor thirst were like our own!”
“Pray hand me yonder bottle,” says Adam. “If it be drinkable
by any manner of mortal, I must moisten my throat with it.”
After some remonstrances, she takes up a champagne bottle, but
is frightened by the sudden explosion of the cork, and drops it
upon the floor. There the untasted liquor effervesces. Had they
quaffed it, they would have experienced that brief delirium,
whereby, whether excited by moral or physical causes, man
sought to recompense himself for the calm, life-long joys which
Eve finds a glass pitcher of water, pure, cold, and bright, as
ever gushed from a fountain among the hills. Both drink; and
such refreshment does it bestow, that they question one another
of this precious liquid be not identical with the stream of life
within them.
“And now,” observes Adam, “we must again try to discover
what sort of a world this is, and why we have been sent hither.”
“Why?—To love one another!” cries Eve. “Is not that
employment enough?”
“Truly is it,” answers Adam, kissing her; “but still—I know
not—something tells us there is labor to be done. Perhaps our
allotted task is no other than to climb into the sky, which is so
much more beautiful than earth.”
“Then would we were there now,” murmurs Eve, “that no
task or duty might come between us!”
They leave the hospitable mansion; and we next see them
passing down State street. The clock on the old State House
points to high noon, when the Exchange should be in its glory,
and present the liveliest emblem of what was the sole business of
life, as regarded a multitude of the fore-gone worldlings. It is
over now. The Sabbath of eternity has shed its stillness along
the street. Not even a news-boy assails the two solitary passers-by,
with an extra penny-paper from the office of the Times or
Mail, containing a full account of yesterday's terrible catastrophe.
Of all the dull times that merchants and speculators have known,
this is the very worst; for, so far as they were concerned, creation
itself has taken the benefit of the bankrupt-act. After all, it is a
pity. Those mighty capitalists, who had just attained the wished-for
wealth! Those shrewd men of traffic, who had devoted so
many years to the most intricate and artificial of sciences, and
had barely mastered it, when the universal bankruptcy was
announced by peal of trumpet! Can they have been so incautious
gone, nor any bills of exchange, or letters of credit, from the
needy on earth to the cash-keepers of Heaven?
Adam and Eve enter a Bank. Start not, ye whose funds are
treasured there! You will never need them now. Call not for
the police! The stones of the street and the coin of the vaults
are of equal value to this simple pair. Strange sight! They
take up the bright gold in handfuls, and throw it sportively into
the air, for the sake of seeing the glittering worthlessness descend
again in a shower. They know not that each of those small
yellow circles was once a magic spell, potent to sway men's
hearts, and mystify their moral sense. Here let them pause in
the investigation of the past. They have discovered the main-spring,
the life, the very essence, of the system that had wrought
itself into the vitals of mankind, and choked their original nature
in its deadly gripe. Yet how powerless over these young inheritors
of earth's hoarded wealth! And here, too, are huge packages
of bank-notes, those talismanic slips of paper, which once had the
efficacy to build up enchanted palaces, like exhalations, and work
all kinds of perilous wonders, yet were themselves but the ghosts
of money, the shadows of a shade. How like is this vault to a
magician's cave, when the all-powerful wand is broken, and the
visionary splendor vanished, and the floor strewn with fragments
of shattered spells, and lifeless shapes once animated by demons!
“Everywhere, my dear Eve,” observes Adam, “we find heaps
of rubbish of one kind or another. Somebody, I am convinced,
has taken pains to collect them—but for what purpose? Perhaps,
hereafter, we shall be moved to do the like. Can that be our
business in the world?”
“Oh, no, no, Adam!” answers Eve. “It would be better to
sit down quietly and look upward to the sky.”
They leave the Bank, and in good time; for had they tarried
later, they would probably have encountered some gouty old goblin
in the vault with his treasure.
Next, they drop into a jeweller's shop. They are pleased with
the glow of gems; and Adam twines a string of beautiful pearls
around the head of Eve, and fastens his own mantle with a magnificent
diamond brooch. Eve thanks him, and views herself
with delight in the nearest looking-glass. Shortly afterward,
observing a boquet of roses and other brilliant flowers in a vase
of water, she flings away the inestimable pearls, and adorns herself
with these lovelier gems of nature. They charm her with
sentiment as well as beauty.
“Surely they are living beings,” she remarks to Adam.
“I think so,” replies Adam, “and they seem to be as little at
home in the world as ourselves.”
We must not attempt to follow every footstep of these investigators
whom their Creator has commissioned to pass unconscious
judgment upon the works and ways of the vanished race. By
this time, being endowed with quick and accurate perceptions,
they begin to understand the purpose of the many things around
them. They conjecture, for instance, that the edifices of the city
were erected, not by the immediate hand that made the world,
but by beings somewhat similar to themselves, for shelter and convenience.
But how will they explain the magnificence of one
habitation, as compared with the squalid misery of another?
Through what medium can the idea of servitude enter their
minds? When will they comprehend the great and miserable
fact,—the evidences of which appeal to their senses everywhere,
—that one portion of earth's lost inhabitants was rolling in luxury,
while the multitude was toiling for scanty food? A wretched
change, indeed, must be wrought in their own hearts, ere they can
conceive the primal decree of Love to have been so completely
abrogated, that a brother should ever want what his brother had.
When their intelligence shall have reached so far, Earth's new
one.
Their wanderings have now brought them into the suburbs of
the city. They stand on a grassy brow of a hill, at the foot of a
granite obelisk, which points its great finger upwards, as if the
human family had agreed, by a visible symbol of age-long
endurance, to offer some high sacrifice of thanksgiving or supplication.
The solemn height of the monument, its deep simplicity,
and the absence of any vulgar and practical use, all strengthen its
effect upon Adam and Eve, and lead them to interpret it by a
purer sentiment than the builders thought of expressing.
“Eve, it is a visible prayer,” observed Adam.
“And we will pray, too,” she replies.
Let us pardon these poor children of neither father nor mother,
for so absurdly mistaking the purport of the memorial, which
man founded and woman finished, on far-famed Bunker Hill.
The idea of war is not native to their souls. Nor have they sympathies
for the brave defenders of liberty, since oppression is one
of their unconjectural mysteries. Could they guess that the green
sward on which they stand so peacefully, was once strewn with
human corpses and purple with their blood, it would equally
amaze them, that one generation of men should perpetrate such
carnage, and that a subsequent generation should triumphantly
commemorate it.
With a sense of delight, they now stroll across green fields and
along the margin of a quiet river. Not to track them too closely,
we next find the wanderers entering a Gothic edifice of grey
stone, where the by-gone world has left whatever it deemed worthy
of record, in the rich library of Harvard University.
No student ever yet enjoyed such solitude and silence as now
broods within its deep alcoves. Little do the present visitors understand
what opportunities are thrown away upon them. Yet
Adam looks anxiously at the long rows of volumes, those storied
ceiling. He takes up a bulky folio. It opens in his hands, as if
spontaneously to impart the spirit of its author to the yet unworn
and untainted intellect of the fresh-created mortal. He stands
poring over the regular columns of mystic characters, seemingly
in studious mood; for the unintelligible thought upon the page has
a mysterious relation to his mind, and makes itself felt, as it were
a burthen flung upon him. He is even painfully perplexed, and
grasps vainly at he knows not what. Oh, Adam, it is too soon,
too soon by at least five thousand years, to put on spectacles, and
busy yourself in the alcoves of a library!
“What can this be?” he murmurs at last. “Eve, methinks
nothing is so desirable as to find out the mystery of this big and
heavy object with its thousand thin divisions. See! it stares me
in the face, as if it were about to speak!”
Eve, by a feminine instinct, is dipping into a volume of fashionable
poetry, the production of certainly the most fortunate of
earthly bards, since his lay continues in vogue when all the great
masters of the lyre have passed into oblivion. But let not his
ghost be too exultant! The world's one lady tosses the book upon
the floor, and laughs merrily at her husband's abstracted mien.
“My dear Adam,” cries she, “you look pensive and dismal!
Do fling down that stupid thing; for even if it should speak, it
would not be worth attending to. Let us talk with one another,
and with the sky, and the green earth, and its trees and flowers.
They will teach us better knowledge than we can find here.”
“Well, Eve, perhaps you are right,” replies Adam, with a sort
of sigh. “Still, I cannot help thinking that the interpretation of
the riddles amid which we have been wandering all day long
might here be discovered.”
“It may be better not to seek the interpretation,” persists Eve.
“For my part, the air of this place does not suit me. If you love
me, come away!”
She prevails, and rescues him from the mysterious perils of the
library. Happy influence of woman! Had he lingered there
long enough to obtain a clue to its treasures,—as was not impossible,
his intellect being of human structure, indeed, but with an
untransmitted vigor and acuteness,—had he then and there become
a student, the annalist of our poor world would soon have recorded
the downfall of a second Adam. The fatal apple of another Tree
of Knowledge would have been eaten. All the perversions and
sophistries, and false wisdom so aptly mimicking the true; all the
narrow truth, so partial that it becomes more deceptive than falsehood;
all the wrong principles and worse practice, the pernicious
examples and mistaken rules of life; all the specious theories,
which turn earth into cloud-land, and men into shadows; all the
sad experience, which it took mankind so many ages to accumulate,
and from which they never drew a moral for their future
guidance—the whole heap of this disastrous lore would have tumbled
at once upon Adam's head. There would have been nothing
left for him, but to take up the already abortive experiment of life,
where we had dropped it, and toil onward with it a little further.
But, blessed in his ignorance, he may still enjoy a new world
in our worn-out one. Should he fall short of good, even as far as
we did, he has at least the freedom—no worthless one—to make
errors for himself. And his literature, when the progress of centuries
shall create it, will be no interminably repeated echo of our
own poetry, and reproduction of the images that were moulded by
our great fathers of song and fiction, but a melody never yet
heard on earth, and intellectual forms unbreathed upon by our
conceptions. Therefore let the dust of ages gather upon the
volumes of the library, and in due season, the roof of the edifice
crumble down upon the whole. When the second Adam's descendants
shall have collected as much rubbish of their own, it
will be time enough to dig into our ruins, and compare the literary
advancement of two independent races.
But we are looking forward too far. It seems to be the vice of
those who have a long past behind them. We will return to the
new Adam and Eve, who, having no reminiscences, save dim and
fleeting visions of a pre-existence, are content to live and be happy
in the present.
The day is near its close, when these pilgrims, who derive their
being from no dead progenitors, reach the cemetery of Mount
Auburn. With light hearts—for earth and sky now gladden each
other with beauty—they tread along the winding paths, among
marble pillars, mimic temples, urns, obelisks, and sarcophagi,
sometimes pausing to contemplate these fantasies of human
growth, and sometimes to admire the flowers wherewith kind Nature
converts decay to loveliness. Can death, in the midst of his
old triumphs, make them sensible that they have taken up the
heavy burthen of mortality, which a whole species had thrown
down? Dust kindred to their own has never lain in the grave.
Will they then recognize, and so soon, that Time and the elements
have an indefeasible claim upon their bodies? Not improbably,
they may. There must have been shadows enough, even amid
the primal sunshine of their existence, to suggest the thought of
the soul's incongruity with its circumstances. They have already
learned that something is to be thrown aside. The idea of Death
is in them, or not far off. But were they to choose a symbol for
him, it would be the Butterfly soaring upward, or the bright Angel
beckoning them aloft, or the Child asleep, with soft dreams visible
through her transparent purity.
Such a Child, in whitest marble, they have found among the
monuments of Mount Auburn.
“Sweetest Eve,” observes Adam, while hand in hand they contemplate
this beautiful object, “yonder sun has left us, and the
whole world is fading from our sight. Let us sleep, as this lovely
little figure is sleeping. Our Father only knows, whether what outward
things we have possessed to-day are to be snatched from us
light, we need not doubt that another morn will find us
somewhere beneath the smile of God. I feel that he has imparted
the boon of existence, never to be resumed.”
“And no matter where we exist,” replies Eve, “for we shall
always be together.”
| Mosses from an old manse | |