And forcibly as this comes home to every one of us, not less forcible is the contrast which exists between this material world, so vigorous, so reproductive, amid all its changes, and the moral 15 world, so feeble, so downward, so resourceless, amid all its aspirations. That which ought to come to naught, endures; that which promises a future, disappoints and is no more. The same sun shines in heaven from first to last, and the 20 blue firmament, the everlasting mountains, reflect his rays; but where is there upon earth the champion, the hero, the law giver, the body politic, the sovereign race, which was great three hundred years ago, and is great now? Moralists 25 and poets, often do they descant upon this innate vitality of matter, this innate perishableness of mind. Man rises to fall: he tends to dissolution from the moment he begins to be; he lives on, indeed, in his children, he lives on in his name, 30 he lives not on in his own person. He is, as regards the manifestations of his nature here below, as a bubble that breaks, and as water poured out upon the earth. He was young, he is old, he is never young again. This is the lament over him, poured forth in verse and in prose, by Christians 5 and by heathen. The greatest work of God's hands under the sun, he, in all the manifestations of his complex being, is born only to die. His bodily frame first begins to feel the power of this constraining law, though it is the last to 10 succumb to it. We look at the gloom of youth with interest, yet with pity; and the more graceful and sweet it is, with pity so much the more; for, whatever be its excellence and its glory, soon it begins to be deformed and dishonored by the 15 very force of its living on. It grows into exhaustion and collapse, till at length it crumbles into that dust out of which it was originally taken.