Have you ever thought of the wealth that perished when paradise was lost? Have you ever thought of the glory of Eden, the first estate of man? I think it was the very dream of God, glowing with ineffable beauty. I think it was rimmed with blue mountains, from whose moss-covered cliffs leaped a thousand glassy streams that spread out in mid-air, like bridal veils, kissing a thousand rainbows from the sun. I think it was an archipelago of gorgeous colors, flecked with green isles, where the grapevine staggered from tree to tree, as if drunk with the wine of its own purple clusters, where peach, and plum, and blood-red cherries, and every kind of berry, bent bough and bush, and shone like showered drops of ruby and of pearl. I think it was a wilderness of flowers, redolent of eternal spring and pulsing with bird-song, where dappled fawns played on banks of violets, where leopards, peaceful and tame, lounged in copses of magnolias, where harmless "The lark was so brim-full of gladness and love, The green fields below him—the blue sky above, That he sang, and he sang, and forever sang he: I love my Love, and my Love loves me." Love songs bubbled from the mellow throats of mocking-birds and bobolinks; dove cooed love to dove; and I think the maiden monkey, fair "Juliet" of the House of Orang-outang, waited on her cocoanut balcony for the coming of her "Romeo," and thus plaintively sang: JULIET. JULIET. (Sung to the air of My Sweetheart's the Man in the Moon.) "My sweetheart's the lovely baboon, I'm going to marry him soon; 'Twould fill me with joy Just to kiss the dear boy, For his charms and his beauty No power can destroy." ROMEO. ROMEO. "I'll sit in the light of the moon, And sing to my darling baboon, When I'm safe by his side And he calls me his bride; Oh! my Angel, my precious baboon!" All paradise was imbued with the spirit of love. Oh, that it could have remained Every rich blessing within the gift of the Almighty Father was poured out from the cornucopia of heaven, into the lap of paradise. But it was a paradise of fools, because they stained it with disobedience and polluted it with sin. It was the paradise of fools because, in the exercise of their own God-given free agency, they tasted the forbidden fruit and fell from their glorious estate. Oh, what a fall was there! It was the fall of innocence and purity; it was the fall of happiness into the abyss of woe; it was the fall of life into the arms of death. It was like the fall of the wounded albatross, from the regions of light, into the sea; it was like the fall of a star from heaven to hell. When the jasper gate forever closed behind the guilty pair, and the I believe they lost intellectual powers which fallen man has never regained. Operating by the consent of natural laws, sinless man would have wrought endless miracles. The mind, winged like a seraph, and armed like a thunderbolt, would have breached the very citadel of knowledge and robbed it of its treasures. I think they lost a plane of being only a little lower than the angels. I believe they lost youth, beauty, and physical immortality. I believe they lost the virtues of heart and soul, and many of the magnificent powers of mind, which made them the images of God, and which would have even brushed aside the now impenetrable veil which hides from mortal eyes the face of Infinite Love; that Love which gave the ever-blessed light, and filled the earth with music of bird, and breeze, and sea; that Love whose melodies we sometimes faintly catch, like spirit voices, The memories and images of paradise lost have been impressed on every human heart, and every individual of the race has his own ideal of that paradise, from the cradle to the grave. But that ideal in so far as its realization in this world is concerned, is like the rainbow, an elusive phantom, ever in sight, never in reach, resting ever on the horizon of hope. |