and bring into collision the present with some long-forgotten past, in a form too trying and too painful for endurance. I have a brilliant Scotch friend, who cannot walk on the seashore--within sight of its [Greek: anêrithmon gelasma], the multitudinous laughter of its waves, or within hearing of its resounding uproar, because they bring up, by links of old association, too insupportably to his mind the agitations of his glittering, but too fervid youth. There is a feeling--morbid, it may be, but for which no anodyne is found in all the schools from Plato to Kant--to which the human mind is liable at times: it is best described in a little piece by Henry More, the "Platonist." He there represents himself as a martyr to his own too passionate sense of beauty, and his consequent too pathetic sense of its decay. Everywhere--above, below, around him, in the earth, in the clouds, in the fields, and in their "garniture of flowers"--he beholds a beauty carried to excess; and this beauty becomes a source of endless affliction to him, because everywhere he sees it liable to the touch of decay and mortal change. During one paroxysm of this sad passion, an angel appears to comfort him; and, by the sudden revelation of her immortal beauty, does, in fact, suspend his grief. But it is only a suspension; for the sudden recollection that her privileged condition, and her exemption from the general fate of beauty, is only by way of exception to a universal rule, restores his grief: "And thou thyself," he says to the angel-- "And thou thyself, that com'st to comfort me, Wouldst strong occasion of deep sorrow bring, If thou wert subject to mortality!" Every man who has ever dwelt with passionate love upon the fair face of some female companion through life must have had the same feeling, and must often, in the exquisite language of Shakspere's sonnets, have commanded and adjured all-conquering Time, there, at least, and upon that one tablet of his adoration, "To write no wrinkle with his antique hand."