best means of touching it, perhaps. Let there be found some Professor of Time and Eternity, skilled to show how the world goes—and is going: who should exhibit, as in a wizard's glass, the unending procession of human life. The Roman in his pride, a hundred million Romans in their pride—all perished; millions of elegant Greeks, with their elegant wives and mistresses, all perished; Attila's thundering hosts riding off the scene—vanished: the clatter of their spears, the fury of their eyes, the tossing of their shaggy hair, the cloud of thoughts that moved upon their faces—they and all that belonged to them.
Not that these personages make the most affecting groups in the series of dissolving views which illustrate the history of the world. I would rather confine myself to Holborn Hill, were I professor, in a penitentiary, of Time and Eternity; and between the period when it lay solitary in the moonlight, clothed with grass, crowned with trees, bitterns booming by the river below, while some wild mother lay under the branches singing to her baby in a tongue dead as herself now—from that time to the present there has been a very pretty striking of tents and wandering away. Quite enough for any professor's purpose. Quite enough, if impressed upon an ignorant vicious heart, to prepare it for a better—certainly for a more responsible life. Your young reprobate will never perceive his relations to his Creator, till he has discovered the relations of mankind to creation, and his own place among mankind. You desire him to contemplate the Future: he cannot do it till he is shown the Past.
There is a Scripture text apropos of this, which I have longed many a day to sermonize upon, but we are far enough from Holborn Hill already; and apart from moral and mental considerations, it is a sufficient reason for building cities in hilly places, if the hard-worked, captive people are thus kept in remembrance of the country, and its peace and health. This is a luxury as well as a good; delight to the senses, as well as medicine for the mind. Some of us love nature with a large and personal love. I am sure I do, for one. Thinking of her, immured in London as I am, I think also of that prisoner in the Bastille, who prayed Monseigneur for "some tidings of my poor wife, were it only her name upon a card." Were I a prisoner long, I should pray not only for that, but for some tidings of my mistress Nature, were it only her name in a leaf. And whereas some of us who have sweethearts go prowling about the dear one's house, searching through the walls for her, so at favourable opportunities I search for my mistress through the bricks and stones of Holborn Hill. In the noon of a midsummer day, with the roar of carts, waggons, Atlas and other omnibusses rattling in my ears, with that little bill of Timmins's on my mind, how have I seen it clad in green, the stream running in the hollow, and white dandelion tufts floating in the air. There a grasshopper chirped; a bee hummed, going his way; and countless small creatures, burrowing in the grass, buzzed and whirred like a company of small cotton-spinners with all their looms at work. Practically, there is no standing timber within several miles of the place; but if I have not seen trees where an
