Mosses from an old manse
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 are still in
the costume that might better have befitted Eden,—it so happens that
their first visit is to a fashionable dry-goods 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, he 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 be 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.”
“Poh! 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
forms, 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 attire than her own
golden locks. However, emulating Eve’s 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 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, like
sunshine,” responds Eve. “Surely we have seen such a countenance
somewhere.”
They go out of the church, and kneeling at its threshold give way to
the spirit’s natural instinct of adoration towards 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? O Judgment Seat, not by the pure in heart vast 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 gray 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. It is a prison. The jailer has left
his post at the summons 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 would have been no more need of the dark
lazar-house into which 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 footfall 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 interest in the departed
family were bemoaning itself in the solitude of hall and chamber.
Perhaps a virgin, the purest of mortal race, has been left behind to