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 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