circumambient Void. There it
still lies; like a thing stationary, imperishable, over which
changeful Time were now accumulating itself in vain, and could not,
any longer, harm it, or hide it.

Thus for _Boswell's Life of Johnson_ has Time done, is Time still
doing, what no ornament of Art or Artifice could have done for it.
Rough Samuel and sleek wheedling James _were_, and _are not_. Their
Life and whole personal Environment has melted into air. The Mitre
Tavern still stands in Fleet Street; but where now is its scot-and-lot
paying, beef-and-ale loving, cocked-hatted, potbellied Landlord; its
rosy-faced, assiduous Landlady, with all her shining brass-pans, waxed
tables, well-filled larder-shelves; her cooks, and bootjacks, and
errand-boys, and watery-mouthed hangers-on? Gone! Gone! The becking
waiter, that with wreathed smiles, wont to spread for Samuel and Bozzy
their "supper of the gods," has long since pocketed his last sixpence;
and vanished, sixpence and all, like a ghost at cock-crowing. The
Bottles they drank out of are all broken, the Chairs they sat on all
rotted and burnt; the very Knives and Forks they ate with have rusted
to the heart, and become brown oxide of iron, and mingled with the
indiscriminate clay. All, all, has vanished; in very deed and truth,
like that baseless fabric of Prospero's air-vision. Of the Mitre
Tavern nothing but the bare walls remain there; of London, of England,
of the World, nothing but the bare walls remain; and these also
decaying, (were they of adamant,) only slower. The mysterious River of
Existence rushes on: a new Billow thereof has arrived, and lashes
wildly as ever round the old embankments; but the former Billow with
_its_ loud, mad eddyings, where is it?--Where?--Now this Book of
Boswell's, this is precisely a Revocation of the Edict of Destiny; so
that Time shall not utterly, not so soon by several centuries, have
dominion over us. A little row of Naphtha-lamps, with its line of
Naphtha-light burns clear and holy through the dead Night of the
Past: they who are gone are still here; though hidden they are
revealed, though dead they yet speak. There it shines, that little
miraculously lamp-lit Pathway; shedding its feebler and feebler
twilight into the boundless dark Oblivion, for that that our Johnson
_touched_ has become illuminated for us: on which miraculous little
Pathway we can still travel, and see wonders.

VIII

MIGHT BURNS HAVE BEEN SAVED[55]

Con