the one achievement or the other, if left to struggle with its own resources and unassisted by hints from without, we need not conjecture. But in each case the solution of the problem was suggested to him, as the materials for working it are still furnished, by the finger of God himself. The great architect of the universe hath planted in its frame all necessary models and materials for the guidance and use of its human inhabitants, leaving them to the exercise of those powers and capacities with which they have been furnished to improve the lessons and apply the examples thus conveyed. In each of the cases of which we have spoken, the constellations which surround the world and "are the poetry of heaven" have been the sources of the inspiration, as they are still the lights by which that inspiration works. The hand that fashioned the "two great lights," and appointed to them their courses, and gave them to be "for signs and for seasons and for days and years," pointed out to man how he might, by the observation of their revolutions, direct his course along the unbroken stream of time or count its waves as they flowed silently and ceaselessly away. The sun and moon were the ancient and at first the only measures of time, as they are the essential foundations of all the modes by which man measures it now; and in the order of the world's architecture, the "watches of the element" which guide us yet were framed and "set in the firmament of heaven" at that distant and uncertain period whose "evening and morning were the fourth day."

Nor did the beneficent power which erected these great meters of time in the constitution of the universe leave the world without suggestions how their use might be improved in the business of more minute subdivision. The thousand natural inequalities of the earth's surface, and the vegetable columns which spring from its bosom, furnish—as do the spires and towers and columns which man rears thereon—so many gnomons of the vast dial, on which are unerringly written with the finger of shadow the shining records of the sky. There is something unutterably solemn in watching the shade creep, day by day, round a circle whose diameter man might measure with his grave or even cover with his hand, and contrasting the limits within which it acts with the spaces of time which its stealing tread measures out, and feeling that it is the faithful index of a progress before which the individual being and the universal frame of things are alike hastening to rapid and inevitable decay. There are few types more awfully representative of that which they typify than is the shadow. It is Time almost made visible. Through it the mind reaches the most vivid impersonation of that mysterious idea which it is capable of containing. It seems as if flung directly from his present and passing wing. The silent and ceaseless motion—gliding for ever on and on, coming round again and again, but reverting never and tarrying never, blotting out the sunshine as it passes and leaving no trace where it has passed—make it the true and solemn symbol of him (the old unresting and unreturning one) who receded not, even when that same shadow went back on the dial of the king of Judah, nor paused when the sun stood still in the midst of heaven and the moon lingered over the valley of Ajalon! Of that mysterious type and its awful morals a lost friend of ours[1] has already spoken better than we can hope to speak; and as he is ("alas, that he is so!") already one whose "sun shall no more go down, neither shall his moon withdraw itself," we will avail ourselves of a language which deserves to be better known, and sounds all the more solemnly that he who uttered it hath since furnished in his own person a fresh verification of the solemn truths which he sung so well.

To the great natural divisions of time (with their aid, and guided by these hints) the ingenuity of man, under the direction of his wants, has been busy since the world began in adding artificial ones, while his heart has been active in supplying impulses and furnishing devices to that end. Years, and months, and days—the periods marked out by the revolutions of our celestial guides—have been aggregated and divided after methods almost as various as the nations of the earth. Years have been composed into cycles and olympiads and generations and reigns, and months resolved into decades and weeks, days into hours, and hours into subdivisions which have been again subdivided almost to the confines of thought. Yet it is only in these latter ages of the world that a measurement has been attained, at once so minute and so closely harmonizing with the motions and regulated by the revolutions of the dials of the sky, that, had the same machinery existed from the commencement of time,—with the art of printing to preserve its results,—the history of the past might be perused, with its discrepancies reconciled and many of its