Time is the measure of life on earth. Its enjoyment is life itself. Its divisions, its days, its hours, its minutes, are fractions of this heavenly gift. Every moment that flies over our heads takes from the future and gives to the irrevocable past, shortening by so much the measure of our days, abridging by so much the means of usefulness committed to our hands. Before the voice which now addresses you shall die away in the air, another hour will have passed, and we shall all have advanced by another stage towards the final goal on earth. Waste or sacrifice of time is, then, waste or sacrifice of life itself: it is partial suicide. The moments lost in listlessness or squandered in unprofitable dissipation, gathered into aggregates, are hours, days, weeks, months, years. The daily sacrifice of a single hour during a year comes at its end to thirty-six working days, allowing ten hours to the day,--an amount of time, if devoted exclusively to one object, ample for the acquisition of important knowledge, and for the accomplishment of inconceivable good. Imagine, if you please, a solid month dedicated, without interruption, to a single purpose,--to the study of a new language, an untried science, an unexplored field of history, a fresh department of philosophy, or to some new sphere of action, some labor of humanity, some godlike charity,--and what visions must not rise of untold accumulations of knowledge, of unnumbered deeds of goodness! Who of us does not each day, in manifold ways, sacrifice these precious moments, these golden hours? There is a legend of Mohammed which teaches how much may be crowded into a moment. It is said that he was suddenly taken up by an angel, and borne beyond the naming bounds of space, where he beheld the wonders of Heaven and Hell, the bliss of the faithful and the torments of the damned in measureless variety, and was then returned to the spot of earth from which he had been lifted,--all in so short a time that the water had not entirely run out of the pitcher which he let fall from his hands when he was borne upwards. But actual life furnishes illustrations of greater point. It is related of a celebrated French jurist, one of the ornaments of the magistracy, that he composed a learned and important work in the quarter hours that draggled between dinner ordered and dinner served. Napoleon directed one of his generals to move on a battery of the enemy, although reinforcements were in sight, saying, "It will take them fifteen minutes to reach the point; I have always observed that these _fifteen minutes_ decide great battles." In the currents of common life they are often as decisive as in the heady fight.