then to renew the process again on the instant, that there may not be the least flaw or error in the account! What a strong sense must be brought home to the mind of the value and irrecoverable nature of the time that is fled; what a thrilling, incessant consciousness of the slippery tenure by which we hold what remains of it! Our very existence must seem crumbling to atoms, and running down (without a miraculous reprieve) to the last fragment. "Dust to dust and ashes to ashes" is a text that might be fairly inscribed on an hour-glass: it is ordinarily associated with the scythe of Time and a Death's-head, as a _Memento mori_; and has, no doubt, furnished many a tacit hint to the apprehensive and visionary enthusiast in favour of a resurrection to another life! [Footnote 37: "Once more, companion of the lonely hour, I'll turn thee up again." _Bloomfield's Poems--The Widow to her Hour-glass._] The French give a different turn to things, less _sombre_ and less edifying. A common and also a very pleasing ornament to a clock, in Paris, is a figure of Time seated in a boat which Cupid is rowing along, with the motto, _L'Amour fait passer le Tems_--which the wits again have travestied into _Le Tems fait passer L'Amour_. All this is ingenious and well; but it wants sentiment. I like a people who have something that they love and something that they hate, and with whom everything is not alike a matter of indifference or _pour passer le tems_. The French attach no importance to anything, except for the moment; they are only thinking how they shall get rid of one sensation for another; all their ideas are _in transitu_. Every thing is detached, nothing is accumulated. It would be a million of years before a Frenchman would think of the _Horas non numero nisi serenas_. Its impassioned repose and _ideal_ voluptuousness are as far from their breasts as the poetry of that line in Shakspeare--"How sweet the moonlight sleeps upon that bank!" They never arrive at the classical--or the romantic. They blow the bubbles of vanity, fashion, and pleasure; but they do not expand their perceptions into refinement, or strengthen them into solidity. Where there is nothing fine in the ground-work of the imagination, nothing fine in the superstructure can be produced. They are light, airy, fanciful (to give them their due)--but when they attempt to be serious (beyond mere good sense) they are either dull or extravagant. When the volatile salt has flown off, nothing but a _caput mortuum_ remains. They have infinite crotchets and caprices with their clocks and watches, which seem made for anything but to tell the hour--gold-repeaters, watches with metal covers, clocks with hands to count the seconds. There is no escaping from quackery and impertinence, even in our attempts to calculate the waste of time. The years gallop fast enough for me, without remarking every moment as it flies; and farther, I must say I