The good emperor Marcus Antoninus, one of those whom a broad churchmanship is free and fain to recognise as Seekers after God, is taken to intimate that the difference between a so-called long and a short life is insignificant, in regard of Eternity, when he indites this aphorism, among his Meditations: “When frankincense is thrown upon the altar, one grain usually falls before another; but then the distance of time is of no moment.” The moments, so to speak, of difference, are not momentous. Do not all go to one place? But in the issue, all depends on the using. Happy the few and evil years of a patriarch, if a patriarch indeed, of a pilgrim going home. Be they few and evil in one sense, or in another very many,— “They will appear like moments when he soars Beyond those sunbreaks.” DAYBREAK NO SOLACE: NIGHTFALL NO RELIEF. DEUTERONOMY xxviii. 36, 37. Not the least impressive of the afflictions denounced against a disloyal people, in the book Deuteronomy, is that which should make day and night a fear and a trouble to them; so that in the morning they should say, “Would God it were even!” and at even, “Would God it were morning!” There is at once terrible realism and suggestiveness in words but too familiar to most who have themselves suffered, or watched by the couch of sleepless suffering. Job utters a complaint of wearisome nights as appointed to him; so that when he lay down, he said, “When shall I arise, and the night be gone?” and thus was he full of tossings to and fro unto the dawning of the day. Like the Psalmist, he cried in the daytime, but it seemed that God heard not; and in the night season he was not silent, but it seemed as though from above there was neither voice, nor any to answer, nor any that regarded. In such cases, one day telleth another of seeming desolation; and one night certifieth another almost of despair. And the eventide is longed for in broad daylight, if haply, with mere change, it may bring relief. But when it has set in, and eve has saddened into night, there is wearying for daybreak, as possibly the bringer of a boon that, however, it fails to bring. A stanza in one of Shakspeare’s poems contains an example to the purpose:— “Thus ebbs and flows the current of her sorrow, And time doth weary time with her complaining: She looks for night, and then she longs for morrow; And both she thinks too long with her remaining: Short time seems long in sorrow’s sharp sustaining. Though woe be heavy, yet it seldom sleeps; And they that watch, see time how slow it creeps.” And thus runs one of Landor’s imitations from the Greek, of an address to Hesperus:— “I have beheld thee in the morning hour, A solitary star, with thankless eyes, Ungrateful as I am! who bade thee rise When sleep all night had wandered from my bower.”