But, for a moment, turn your thoughts to estimates that far exceed the periods of history, and confound all our ordinary measurements. What is our mortal existence, into which we crowd so much interest,--over the anticipated length of which we slumber,--into whose uncertain future we project our lithe plans so confidently,--compared to the age of the heavens,--the lifetime of worlds?--compared to their march, from the moment when they obeyed the creative fiat to that when they shall complete their great cycle? It takes three years for light to travel from the nearest fixed star to the earth; from another it takes twelve years; while, on its journey from a star of the twelfth magnitude, twenty four billions of miles away, it consumes four thousand years. And yet we speak of long life! Why, when the light that wraps us now shall be changed for the light that is just leaping from that distant star, where in the gray bosom of the past shall we be? Sunken, forgotten, crumbled to imperceptible atoms; the ashes of generations-the dust of empires-heaped over us! And when we compare those wide estimates to that divine eternity that evolves and limits all things, how does our individual existence on the earth dwindle and vanish!--a heart-throb in the pulses of the universal life,--a quivering leaf in the forest of being,--"a tale that is told"! And yet, my friends, our realization of existence is so intense,--the horizon of the present shuts us in so completely,--that it really requires an effort for us to pause and remember that we are such transitory beings. It cannot be (we may unconsciously reason), that we to whom this earth is bound with ligaments so intimate and strong; whose breathing and motion-whose contact and action here-are such realities; whose ears hear these varying sounds of life; whose eyes drink in this perpetual and changing beauty; to whom business, study, friendship, pleasure, domestic relations, are such fresh and constant facts; to whom the dawn and the twilight, the nightly slumber and the daily meal, are such regular experiences; to whom our possessions, our houses, lands, goods, money, are such substantial things;--it cannot be that we are not fixed permanently here,--that the years like a swift river, sweep us nearer and nearer to a point where we must sink and leave it all,--that the corridors of the earth echo our footsteps only as the footsteps of a successive march-myriads going before, and myriads coming after us-and soon they will catch no more murmurs of our individual life; for that will be as "a tale that is told."