“And the angel lifted up his hand to heaven and sware by Him that liveth forever and ever that there should be time no longer.”—Rev. x., 6. Φ The earth was dead. The other planets also had died one after the other. The sun was extinguished. But the stars still shone; there were still suns and worlds. In the measureless duration of eternity, time, an essentially relative conception, is determined by each world, and even in each world this conception is dependent upon the consciousness of the individual. Each world measures its own duration. The year of the earth is not that of Neptune. The latter is 164 times the former, and yet is not longer relatively to the absolute. There is no common measure between time and eternity. In empty space there is no time, no years, no centuries; only the possibility of a measurement of time which becomes real the moment a revolving world appears. Without some periodic motion no conception whatever of time is possible. The earth no longer existed, nor her celestial companion, the little isle of Mars, nor the beautiful sphere of Venus, nor the colossal world of Jupiter, nor the strange universe of Saturn, which had lost its rings, nor the slow-moving Uranus and Neptune—not even the glorious sun, in whose fecundating heat these mansions of the heavens had basked for so many centuries. The sun was a dark ball, the planets also; and still this invisible system sped on in the glacial cold of starry space. So far as life is concerned, all these worlds were dead, did not exist. They survived their past history like the ruins of the dead cities of Assyria which the archæologist uncovers in the desert, moving on their way in darkness through the invisible and the unknown. No genius, no magician could recall the vanished past, when the earth floated bathed in light, with its broad green fields waking to the morning sun, its rivers winding like long serpents through the verdant meadows, its woods alive with the songs of birds, its forests filled with deep and mysterious shadows, its seas heaving with the tides or roaring in the tempest, its mountain slopes furrowed with rushing streams and cascades, its gardens enameled with flowers, its nests of birds and cradles of children, and its toiling population, whose activity had transformed it and who lived so joyously a life perpetuated by the delights of an endless love. All this happiness seemed eternal. What has become of those mornings and evenings, of those flowers and those lovers, of that light and perfume, of those harmonies and joys, of those beauties and dreams? All is dead, has disappeared in the darkness of night. The world dead, all the planets dead, the sun extinguished. The solar system annihilated, time itself suspended. Time lapses into eternity. But eternity remains, and time is born again.