The sign of peace who first displays, The Olive wreath possesses; The lover with the Myrtle sprays Adorns his crisped tresses. In love the sad forsaken wight The Willow garland weareth; The funeral man, befitting night, The baleful Cypress beareth. To Pan we dedicate the Pine, Whose slips the shepherd graceth; Again the Ivy and the Vine On his front Bacchus placeth. They who so stanchly oppose innovations, should remember Bacon’s words: “Every medicine is an innovation, and he that will not apply new remedies must expect new evils; for time is the greatest innovator; and if time of course alter things to the worse, and wisdom and counsel shall not alter them to the better, what shall be the end?” How much time has to do with our successes is thus solemnly told by the Preacher: “The race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all.”—_Ecclesiastes_ ix. 11. How truthfully has Dr. Johnson said: “So little do we accustom ourselves to consider the effects of time, that things necessary and certain often surprise us like unexpected contingencies. We leave the beauty in her bloom, and, after an absence of twenty years, wonder, at our return, to find her faded. We meet those whom we left children, and can scarcely persuade ourselves to treat them as men. The traveller visits in age those countries through which he rambled in his youth, and hopes for merriment in the old place. The man of business, wearied with unsatisfactory prosperity, retires to the town of his nativity, and expects to play away the last years with the companions of his childhood, and recover youth in the fields where he once was young.” Dr. Armstrong, the friend of Thomson, has left this solemn apostrophe on the Wrecks and Mutations of Time: What does not fade? the tower that long had stood The crush of thunder and the warring winds, Shook by the slow but sure destroyer Time, Now hangs in doubtful ruins o’er its base, And flinty pyramids and walls of brass Descend. The Babylonian spires are sunk; Achaia, Rome, and Egypt moulder down. Time shakes the stable tyranny of thrones, And tottering empires rush by their own weight. This huge rotundity we tread grows old, And all these worlds that roll around the sun; The sun himself shall die, and ancient night Again involve the desolate abyss, Till the Great Father, through the lifeless gloom, Extend his arm to light another world, And bid new planets roll by other laws.