ious Egypt, haughty Assyria, glorious Greece, kingly Rome;--how
spectral they have become. They stand out in no relief. As we recede
from them, they sink back, flat and inanimate on the horizon. Each is a
tale that has been told. Surely, then, if such is the life of nations,
I need not labor to impress upon you a sense of the brevity of our
individual existence.

But, for a moment, turn your thoughts to estimates that far exceed the
periods of history, and confound all our ordinary measurements. What is
our mortal existence, into which we crowd so much interest,--over the
anticipated length of which we slumber,--into whose uncertain future
we project our lithe plans so confidently,--compared to the age of the
heavens,--the lifetime of worlds?--compared to their march, from the
moment when they obeyed the creative fiat to that when they shall
complete their great cycle? It takes three years for light to travel
from the nearest fixed star to the earth; from another it takes twelve
years; while, on its journey from a star of the twelfth magnitude,
twenty four billions of miles away, it consumes four thousand years. And
yet we speak of long life! Why, when the light that wraps us now shall
be changed for the light that is just leaping from that distant star,
where in the gray bosom of the past shall we be? Sunken, forgotten,
crumbled to imperceptible atoms; the ashes of generations-the dust of
empires-heaped over us! And when we compare those wide estimates to
that divine eternity that evolves and limits all things, how does our
individual existence on the earth dwindle and vanish!--a heart-throb
in the pulses of the universal life,--a quivering leaf in the forest of
being,--"a tale that is told"!

And yet, my friends, our realization of existence is so intense,--the
horizon of the present shuts us in so completely,--that it really
requires an effort for us to pause and remember that we are such
transitory beings. It cannot be (we may unconsciously reason), that we
to whom this earth is bound with ligaments so intimate and strong; whose
breathing and motion-whose contact and action here-are such realities;
whose ears hear these varying sounds of life; whose eyes drink in this
perpetual and changing beauty; to whom business, study, friendship,
pleasure, domestic relations, are such fresh and constant facts; to whom
the dawn and the twilight, the nightly slumber and the daily meal, are
such regular experiences; to whom our p