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THE BOOK OF CHRISTMAS.

INTRODUCTORY CHAPTER.

We have learnt to speak of time, because it is that portion of eternity with which we have presently to do,—as if it were a whit more intelligible (less vague, abstract, and unimaginable) than that eternity of which it is a part. He who can conceive of the one, must be able to embrace the awful image of the other. We think of time as of a section of eternity, separated and intrenched by absolute limits; and thus we seem to have arrived at a definite idea, surrounded by points on which the mind can rest. But when the imagination sets out upon the actual experiment, and discovers that those limits are not assignable, save on one only side, and finds but a single point on which to rest its failing wing, and looks from thence along an expanse whose boundaries are nowhere else within the range of its restricted vision,—then does the mortal bird return into its mortal nest, wearied with its ineffectual flight, and convinced that a shoreless ocean and one whose shores it cannot see are alike formless and mysterious to its dim and feeble gaze.

And yet notwithstanding the connection of these two ideas,—of time and of eternity,—(the notion of the former being only reached through the latter) we deal familiarly, and even jestingly, with the one, while the mind approaches the other with reverential awe. Types, and symbols, and emblems—and those ever of a grave meaning—are the most palpable expressions which we venture to give to our conceptions of the one; whilst the other we figure and personify,—and that, too often, after a fashion in which the better part of the moral is left unrepresented. Yet who shall personify time? And who that has ever tried it, in the silence of his chamber and the stillness of his heart, hath not bowed down in breathless awe before the solemn visions which his conjuration has awakened? Oh, the mysterious shapes which Time takes, when it rises up into the mind as an image, at those hours of lonely inquisition!—"And he said unto her, 'What form is he of?' And she said, 'An old man cometh up; and he is covered with a mantle.'"—The mysterious presence which it assumes "in thoughts from the visions of the night, when deep sleep falleth on men"! Who, as he strove to collect the mournful attributes about which his fancy had been busy into an impersonation, hath not suddenly felt as if "a spirit passed before his face! . . . It stood still, but he could not discern the form thereof; an image was before his eyes, there was silence;" and out of that silence hath seemed to come a voice like that which whispered to Job, "They that dwell in houses of clay, whose foundation is in the dust, which are crushed before the moth, they are destroyed from morning to evening; they perish for ever, without any regarding it."

Time, abstractedly considered as what in truth it is,—a portion of the vast ocean of eternity, a river flowing from the sea and flowing to the sea, a channel leading from deep to deep, through shores on which the races of the world are permitted to build for awhile, until the great waters shall once more cover all, and time, as time, "shall be no more,"—must long have defied the skill of man to map out its surface, and write his memorials upon its impalpable bosom. The thousand keels that sweep over the visible waters of the world leave on their face traces of their passage more legible and enduring than do the generations of men as they come and go on that viewless and voiceless stream. The ingenuity which has taught man to lay down the plan of the material ocean, to assign to each spot on its uniform surface its positive whereabout and actual relation, and by a series of imaginary lines and figures to steer his way across its pathless solitudes with a knowledge as certain as that which guides him amidst the substantive and distinctive features of the solid earth, is scarcely more admirable than that which, by a similar device, has enabled him to measure out the expanse of the silent river, to cover, as it were, its surface with a crowd of imaginary latitudes and longitudes intersecting each other at all points, and to ascertain at any moment, by observation, his relative position on the great stream of time.

How long the unaided genius of man might have been ere it could have fallen upon a scheme for