We remember a piece of stage sentiment, beginning “Time! Time! Time! why ponder o’er thy glass, And count the dull sands as they pass?” &c. It was touchingly sung, but had too much of gloom and despondency for the theatre: possibly it may have reminded some of its hearers of their own delinquency. With what solemnity has our great Dramatic Bard foreshadowed Time’s waning: To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow, Creeps in this petty pace from day to day, To the last syllable of recorded time; And all our yesterdays have lighted fools The way to dusty death. His departure is again sketched in _Troilus and Cressida:_ Time is like a fashionable host, That slightly shakes his parting guest by th’ hand, But with his arms outstretch’d, as he would fly, Grasps the incomer. Sir Walter Scott thus paints Time’s evanescence: Time rolls his ceaseless course.—The race of yore, Who danced our infancy upon their knee, And told our marvelling boyhood legends store Of their strange ’ventures happ’d by land or sea, How are they blotted from the things that be! Cowley has this significant couplet: To things immortal Time can do no wrong, And that which never is to die for ever must be young. Yet, what a treasure is this: My inheritance! how wide and fair! Time is my estate; to Time I’m heir. _Wilhelm Meister:_ Carlyle. “Time is almost a human word, and change entirely a human idea: in the system of nature we should rather say progress than change. The sun appears to sink in the ocean in darkness, but rises in another hemisphere; the ruins of a city fall, but they are often used to form more magnificent structures, as at Rome; but even when they are destroyed, so as to produce only dust, nature asserts her empire over them, and the vegetable world rises in constant youth, and in a period of annual successions, by the labours of man, providing food, vitality, and beauty upon the wreck of monuments which were once raised for purposes of glory, but which are now applied to objects of utility.” As this beautiful passage was written by Sir Humphry Davy nearly three-and-thirty years since, the above use of the word _progress_ had nothing to do with the semi-political sense in which it is now commonly employed. Nevertheless, there occur in the writings of our great chemical philosopher occasional views of the advancement of the world in knowledge, and its real authors, with which the progressists of the present day fraternise.