414 SKETCHES OF CREATION. 



bonfire will furnish warmth for the lifetime of an epheme- 

 ron. A molten lava-stream consumes a hundred years in 

 cooling. The great globe of the earth, which is cooling 

 now at the rate of a degree in thirty-five thousand years, 

 was once a sphere of molten granite, and has consumed 

 time enough to pass from that state to this. The sun is so 

 vast that, though he began to cool at a still remoter epoch, 

 the temperature retained to-day is 46,000 times as high as 

 that of the surface of our planet. The epoch when his 

 rays will be sensibly weakened is at a distance expressed 

 by millions of years. 



What thoughts rise upon us as we utter these words ! 

 We hang here upon our planet, poised in the midst of in- 

 finite space and infinite time. Whence we came, we know 

 not ; whither we are bound, hope and faith only can re- 

 veal. We open our eyes for a moment, like an infant in 

 its sleep, and anon they are closed ; or, perchance, like the 

 waking somnambulist, in his fall from the house-top to the 

 pavement, we rouse to an instant's consciousness of the 

 rush of events and the coming crash — and the busy activ- 

 ities of Nature move on as if we had not existed. 



A few days since, a friend of mine exhibited to me a sil- 

 ver coin dug up from the rubbish of the hoary East. It 

 was rude, irregular, and begrimed with age. Upon one 

 side was raised the image of a Grecian warrior. Above 

 the head I could trace, with difficulty, but with certainty, 

 the Greek letters which spelled the name of Alexander. 

 Venerable coin ! thought I ; and my imagination wandered 

 back through twenty-two centuries, till I saw the Issus 

 and the Granicus, and the hosts of Darius melting before 

 the fury of the Macedonian conqueror. I felt transported 

 back to antiquity. But then I remembered the Nineveh 

 marbles upon which I had gazed, and the black and skinny 

 mummies that had looked out at me from their withered 



