ages our ears, in the pauses of care and
labor. We listen to it in the noonday rest, and around the evening fire.
It is a slight break in the monotony of our business,--an interlude in
the solemn march of life. And thus, in some respects, is life itself.
It is so, if we take into view a long series of existence, such as the
succession of human generations, or, still more, the periods of creative
development, and the computations of time as applied to the forms and
changes of the material universe. In this vast train of being, our
individual existence, however important to ourselves, is but an
interlude-a tale. Let us, then, for a while, lay aside any conventional
method of estimating our life,--a method in which that life fills a
large space, simply because it is brought near to the eye,--and let us
endeavor to take a view of it, as it were, from the fixed stars, or from
the elevation of the immortal state.

Compare, then, if you will, this life of yours or mine, not with the
personal standard of threescore years and ten, but with the whole course
of human history; and instantly we appear but as bubbles in the stream
of ages. But, again, consider how history itself is as "a tale that is
told;" and then, indeed, what a mere incident in it all is your life
and mine! If we stand off at the distance of a few centuries, so that we
have no present interest in them, it is strange how the proudest empires
assume an empty and spectral aspect. Their growth and decline occupied
ages; but what a brief achievement it appears now! Why puzzle ourselves
about their origin, or seek to disengage the true from the fabulous in
their history? Why strain laboriously to settle names, and dates, and
dynasties? What mere point they have occupied in the processes of
the great universe! Their hieroglyphic pillars, their gray old
pyramids;--what are they to the age of Uranus, or the new planet? Each
of these empires fulfilled its mission, and relatively that mission was
a great one; but in the long sweep of God's providence, and among the
phenomena of absolute being, what a brief link, a subordinate climax, it
was! The huge ribs of the earth, and the coral islands of the sea were
longer in building; and even these are transitory manifestations of
God's purposes, which stream around us through constant change
and succession. And what, then, are these nations-these epochs of
humanity-but waves rising and breaking on the great sea of eternity?
Myster