The New Adam and Eve

From "Mosses from an Old Manse"

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 race of men. From cities and fields,
sea-shore and midland 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 footprints 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
repeople this waste and deserted earth, we will suppose a new 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 incrusted 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