Mosses from an old manse
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 bouquet 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 shah have reached so far, Earth’s new progeny will
have little reason to exult over her old rejected 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 leave
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 unconjectured 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 gray stone, where the
bygone 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 heights of human lore,
ascending one above another from floor to 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 if it were a burden flung upon him. He is even painfully
perplexed, and grasps vainly at he knows not what. O Adam, it is too
soon, too soon by at least five thousand years, to put on spectacles
and bury 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 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 clew 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 cloudland 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 he had dropped it, and toil
onward with it a little farther.
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 nature converts decay to loveliness. Can Death, in the midst
of his old triumphs, make them sensible that they have taken up the
heavy burden 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 forever. But should our
earthly life be leaving us with the departing 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.”
EGOTISM; OR, THE BOSOM SERPENT
“Here he comes!” shouted the boys along the street. “Here comes the man
with a snake in his bosom!”
This outcry, saluting Herkimer’s ears as he was about to enter the iron
gate of the Elliston mansion, made him pause. It was not without a
shudder that he found himself on the point of meeting his former
acquaintance, whom he had known in the glory of youth, and whom now
after an interval of five years, he was to find the victim either of a
diseased fancy or a horrible physical misfortune.
“A snake in his bosom!” repeated the young sculptor to himself. “It
must be he. No second man on earth has such a bosom friend. And now, my
poor Rosina, Heaven grant me wisdom to discharge my errand aright!
Woman’s faith must be strong indeed since thine has not yet failed.”
Thus musing, he took his stand at the entrance of the gate and waited
until the personage so singularly announced should make his appearance.
After an instant or two he beheld the figure of a lean man, of
unwholesome look, with glittering eyes and long black hair, who seemed
to imitate the motion of a snake; for, instead of walking straight
forward with open front, he undulated along the pavement in a curved
line. It may be too fanciful to say that something, either in his moral
or material aspect, suggested the idea that a miracle had been wrought
by transforming a serpent into a man, but so imperfectly that the snaky
nature was yet hidden, and scarcely hidden, under the mere outward
guise of humanity. Herkimer remarked that his complexion had a greenish
tinge over its sickly white, reminding him of a species of marble out
of which he had once wrought a head of Envy, with her snaky locks.