The acceleration of mental process is equivalent to the lengthening of life. If a great many thoughts pass through your mind you will believe a long time has elapsed, many hours or days. In dreams a rush of many thoughts, of seeming experiences, of spending hours and going through a great variety of actions and companies, and when we start up and look at the watch, instead of a long night we are surprised to find it was a short nap. The opium-eater says, “I sometimes seemed to have lived seventy or a hundred years in one night.” You know what is told of the experience of some persons who have been recovered from drowning. They relate that their whole life’s history seemed to pass before them in review. They remembered in a moment all that they ever did. If we occupy ourselves long on this wonderful faculty, and see the natural helps of it in the mind, and the way in which new knowledge calls upon old knowledge—new giving undreamed-of value to old; everywhere relation and suggestion, so that what one had painfully held by strained attention and recapitulation now falls into place and is clamped and locked by inevitable connection as a planet in its orbit (every other orb, or the law or system of which it is a part, being a perpetual reminder),—we cannot fail to draw thence a sublime hint that thus there must be an endless increase in the power of memory only through its use; that there must be a proportion between the power of memory and the amount of knowables; and since the Universe opens to us, the reach of the memory must be as large. With every broader generalization which the mind makes, with every deeper insight, its retrospect is also wider. With every new insight into the duty or fact of to-day we come into new possession of the past. When we live by principles instead of traditions, by obedience to the law of the mind instead of by passion, the Great Mind will enter into us, not as now in fragments and detached thoughts, but the light of to-day will shine backward and forward. Memory is a presumption of a possession of the future. Now we are halves, we see the past but not the future, but in that day will the hemisphere complete itself and foresight be as perfect as aftersight. BOSTON. “We are citizens of two fair cities,” said the Genoese gentleman to a Florentine artist, “and if I were not a Genoese, I should wish to be Florentine.” “And I,” replied the artist, “if I were not Florentine”—“You would wish to be Genoese,” said the other. “No,” replied the artist, “I should wish to be Florentine.” The rocky nook with hill-tops three Looked eastward from the farms, And twice each day the flowing sea Took Boston in its arms. * * * * * The sea returning day by day Restores the world-wide mart; So let each dweller on the Bay Fold Boston in his heart.