But out of these conventional and multiplied divisions of time, these wheels within the great wheel, arise results far more important than the verification of a chronological series or the establishment of the harmonies of history. Through them not only may the ages of the world be said to intercommunicate, and the ends of the earth in a sense to meet, but by their aid the whole business of the life of nations and of individuals is regulated, and a set of mnemonics established upon which hinges the history of the human heart. By the multiplied but regular system of recurrences thus obtained, order is made to arise out of the web of duties and the chaos of events; and at each of the thousand points marked out on these concentric circles are written their appropriate duties and recorded their special memories. The calendar of every country is thus covered over with a series of events whose recollection is recalled and influence kept alive by the return of the cycles, in their ceaseless revolution, to those spots at which the record of each has been written; and acts of fasting or of festival, of social obligation or of moral observance,--many of which would be surely lost or overlooked, amidst the inextricable confusion in which, without this systematic arrangement, they must be mingled,--are severally pointed out by the moving finger of Time as he periodically reaches the place of each on his concentric dials. But besides the calendar of general direction and national observance, where is the heart that has not a private calendar of its own? Long ere the meridian of life has been attained, the individual man has made many a memorandum of joy or pain for his periodical perusal, and established many a private celebration, pleasant or mournful, of his own. How many a lost hope and blighted feeling which the heart is the better for recalling, and would not willingly forget, would pass from the mind amid the crowd and noise and bustle of the world, but for these tablets on which it is ineffaceably written and yearly read! How many an act of memory, with its store of consolations and its treasure of warnings, would remain postponed, amid the interests of the present, till it came to be forgotten altogether, but for that system which has marked its positive place upon the wheels of time, and brings the record certainly before the mental eye, in their unvarying revolution! Many are the uses of these diaries of the heart. By their aid something is saved from the wrecks of the past for the service of the present; the lights of former days are made to throw pleasant reflections upon many an after period of life; the weeds which the world and its cares had fostered are again and again cleared away from the sweet and wholesome fountain of tears; the fading inscriptions of other years are renewed, to yield their morals to the future; and the dead are restored, for a fleeting hour of sweet