Time and change are great, only with reference to the faculties of the beings which note them. The insect of an hour, fluttering, during its transient existence, in an atmosphere of perfume, would attribute unchanging duration to the beautiful flowers of the cistus, whose petals cover the dewy [87/88] grass but a few hours after it has received the lifeless body of the gnat. These flowers, could they reflect, might contrast their transitory lives with the prolonged existence. of their greener neighbours. The leaves themselves, counting their brief span by the lapse of a few moons, might regard as almost indefinitely extended the duration of the common parent of both leaf and flower. The lives of individual trees are lost in the continued destruction and renovation which take place in forest masses. Forests themselves, starved by the exhaustion of the soil, or consumed by fire, succeed each other in slow gradation. A forest of oaks waves its luxuriant branches over a spot which has been fertilized by the ashes of a forest of pines. These periods again merge into other and still longer cycles, during which the latest of a thousand forests sinks beneath the waves, from the gradual subsidence of its parent earth; or in which extensive inundations, by accumulating the silt of centuries, gradually convert the [88/89] living trunks into their stony resemblances. Stratum upon stratum subsides in comminuted particles, and is accumulated in the depths of ocean, whence they again arise, consolidated by pressure and by heat, to form the continents and mountains of a new creation.
Such, in endless succession, is the history of the changes of the globe we dwell upon; and human observation, aided by human reason, has as yet discovered few signs of a beginning—no symptom of an end. Yet, in that more extended view which recognises our planet as one amongst the attendants of a central luminary; that sun itself,—the soul, as it were, of vegetable and animal existence, but an insignificant individual among its congeners of the milky way:— when we remember that that cloud of light, gleaming with its myriad systems, is but an isolated nebula amongst a countless host of rivals, which the starry firmament surrounding us [89/90] on all sides, presents in every varied form;— some as uncondensed masses of attenuated light; — some as having, in obedience to attractive forces, assumed a spherical figure; others, as if farther advanced in the history of their fate, enclosing a denser central nucleus surrounded by a more diluted light, spreading into such vast space, that the whole of our own nebula would be lost in it:—others there are, in which the apparently unformed and irregular mass of nebulous light is just curdling, as it were, into separate systems; whilst many present a congeries of distinct points of light, each, perhaps, the splendid luminary of a creation more glorious than our own;—when the birth, the progress, and the history of sidereal systems are considered, we require some other unit of time than even that comprehensive one which astronomy has unfolded to our view. Minute and almost infinitesimal as is the time which comprises the history of our race compared with that which records the history of our system, the space even of [90/91] this latter period forms too limited a standard wherewith to measure the footmarks of eternity.
12 November 2014