When the Preacher exclaimed, "Vanity of vanities, all is vanity," he did not exclude his own wisdom. "I communed with my own heart, saying, Lo, I am come to great estate, and have gotten more wisdom than all that have gone before me in Jerusalem: yea, my heart hath great experience of wisdom and knowledge. And I gave my heart to know wisdom and to know madness and folly: I perceived that this also is vexation of spirit. For in much wisdom is much grief: and he that increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow." The Preacher, whoever he may have been, has uttered thoughts upon which many eloquent followers have expatiated. More than two thousand years have passed since the words were written; philosophies have risen and spread and decayed; and yet, in this year 1895, can we say that they have brought more than a multiplication of doubt? Has the increase of knowledge as yet diminished sorrow, or established any firm standing ground from which we may look upon the universe and say that the eternal riddle is, I will not say solved, but brought a step nearer to solution? A great poet--I can't tell whether he lived in the twelfth or the nineteenth century, for the phrase is equally characteristic of either Omar Khayyam or Edward Fitzgerald--gives the same thought:-- Myself, when young, did eagerly frequent Doctor and saint, and heard great argument About it and about: but evermore Came out by the same door as in I went. What, indeed, are eight or twenty centuries in the life even of this planet? There are moments at which we all have suddenly felt by flashes the sensation of being suspended in vast abysses of space and time: when we see, for example, a chart of the heavens which has been recently revealed to us by astronomers, and find that spaces between the stars shown to us by ordinary eyesight are filled in every direction with world beyond world, vast systems of worlds, worlds in every stage of evolution, growing out of nebulous vapour or sinking into eternal coldness: while the imagination is staggered and bewildered by the inconceivable vastness of the spaces indicated, and its own infinitesimal pettiness. If we stroll into a museum and look at the petrified bones of some grotesque monster, and after rejoicing, perhaps, that there is an end of him, we are struck by the thought of the vast lapse of ages during which he was being slowly hammered out of some mere primitive form, and then slowly decayed, and was gradually elbowed out of existence by monsters a degree less preposterous than himself, and gain a new measure of the portentous lapse of time. The greatest of poets has summed up the impression in the phrase which Carlyle was fond of quoting: "we are such stuff as dreams are made of": and our little speck of existence a vanishing quantity in comparison of the infinite above and below and around us, which we dimly infer though we cannot distinctly realise it. If in such a mood, common at times to all who can