bition below endures, yet it is
made up of changes, and the spectators shift as often. Each rank
of the host, as it advances from the mists of its commencing
career, wears a smile caught from the morning light of hope, but,
as it draws near to the fatal bourne, takes on a mournful cast
from the shadows of the unknown realm. The places we occupy were
not vacant before we came, and will not be deserted when we go,
but are forever filling and emptying afresh.

"Still to every draught of vital breath
Renew'd throughout the bounds of earth and ocean,
The melancholy gates of death
Respond with sympathetic motion."

We appear, there is a short flutter of joys and pains, a bright
glimmer of smiles and tears, and we are gone. But whence did we
come? And whither do we go? Can human thought divine the answer?

It adds no little solemnity and pathos to these reflections to
remember that every considerate person in the unnumbered
successions that have preceded us, has, in his turn, confronted
the same facts, engaged in the same inquiry, and been swept from
his attempts at a theoretic solution of the problem into the real
solution itself, while the constant refrain in the song of
existence sounded behind him, "One generation passeth away, and
another generation cometh; but the earth abideth forever." The
evanescent phenomena, the tragic plot and scenery of human birth,
action, and death, conceived on the scale of reality, clothed in

"The sober coloring taken from an eye That hath kept watch o'er
man's mortality,"

and viewed in a susceptible spirit, are, indeed, overwhelmingly
impressive. They invoke the intellect to its most piercing
thoughts. They swell the heart to its utmost capacity of emotion.
They bring us upon the bended knees of wonder and prayer.

"Between two worlds life hovers, like a star'
Twixt night and morn upon the horizon's verge.
How little do we know that which we are!
How less what we may be! The eternal surge
Of time and tide rolls on, and bears afar
Our bubbles: as the old burst, new emerge,
Lash'd from the foam of ages: while the graves
Of empires heave but like some passing waves."

Widely regarding the history of human life from the beginning,
what a visionary spectacle it is! How miraculously permanent in
the whole! how sorrowfully ephemeral in the parts! What pathetic
sentiments it awakens! Amidst what awful mysteries it hangs! The
subject of the derivation of the soul has been copiously disc