e liability to _smart_. You always speak of
change with a sort of vague horror that surprises me. Though all
things round us are for ever shifting and altering, and though we
ourselves vary and change, there is a supreme spirit of
steadfastness in the midst of this huge unrest, and an abiding,
unshaken, immovable principle of good guiding this vanishing world
of fluctuating atoms, in whose eternal permanence of nature we
largely participate, and our tendency toward and aspiration for
whose perfect stability is one of the very causes of the progress,
and therefore mutability, of our existence. Perhaps the most
painful of all the forms in which change confronts us is in the
increased infirmities and diminished graces which after long
absence we observe in those we love; the failure of power and
vitality in the outward frame, the lessened vividness of the
intellect we have admired, strike us with a sharp surprise of
distress, and it is startling to have revealed suddenly to us, in
the condition of others, how rapidly, powerfully, and unobservedly
time has been dealing with ourselves. But those who believe in
eternity should be able to accept time, and the ruin of the altar
from which the flame leaps up to heaven signifies little.

My father and I went to visit Macdonald's collection of sculpture
to-day. I was very much pleased with some of the things; there are
some good colossal figures, and an exquisite statue of a kneeling
girl, that charmed me greatly; there are some excellent busts, too.
How wonderfully that irrevocable substance assumes the soft, round
forms of life! The color in its passionless purity (absence of
color, I suppose I should say) is really harder than the substance
itself of marble. I could not fall in love with a statue, as the
poor girl in Procter's poem did with the Apollo Belvidere, though I
think I could with a fine portrait: how could one fall in love with
what had no eyes! Was it not Thorwaldsen who said that the three
materials in which sculptors worked--clay, plaster, and
marble--were like life, death, and immortality? I thought my own
bust (the one Macdonald executed in Edinburgh, you know) very good;
the marble is beautiful, and I really think my friend did wonders
with his impracticable subject; the shape of the head an