make the greatest demand upon the nervous system. Pain, suspense, and dullness are the circumstances which most certainly exhaust nervous energy and retard the movement of time; and unfamiliar circumstances tend to produce a similar effect. The first week at a strange place seems double the length of any succeeding week, and in walking or travelling through new country, the return seems only half as long as the outward journey. Another thing which makes time pass slowly is thinking about it. The effect of directing the attention upon the rate at which time is passing, may easily be made the subject of direct experiment. In a railway journey, for instance, there is no surer way to make time pass slowly than to compare one's watch and one's Bradshaw at every station, and calculate exactly how much time must yet elapse before one can reach one's journey's end. As the proverb says, "A watched pot never boils." If on such wearisome occasions one can by any means cheat oneself into taking no notice of the time of day, one is almost sure to be rewarded by finding it unexpectedly late when one's attention is again drawn to the subject. But the standard of comparison by which the speed of time while actually on the wing is most commonly judged, consist of wishes. We say it passes slowly when we mean that it is being spent in a manner in which, if we had our choice, less of it should be spent; it flies when we would fain prolong the particular phase through which we are passing; and this not from an inscrutable perversity in the nature of time, but simply because we measure it against our own ideal arrangements. Partly also perhaps it is because the mental revolt against the unpleasant phases, though not passing into outward action, is yet sufficient to exhaust nervous energy, and so to affect the physical sense of duration.

The conditions which determine the space occupied in the mind by any given period in the past or future are less obscure. This seems to depend simply upon the amount of thought and feeling which has been compressed into, or which is excited by the anticipant of, that period. There are days which have not seemed to pass slower or quicker than

others, in which indeed most likely no notice has been taken of the rate at which time was passing, but which afterwards loom larger than ordinary weeks, and which we feel to be rightly entitled to as much room in our minds as any such week. Indeed it would be difficult to deny that in such days we really have lived longer than in others. The portion of life allotted to each day is only nominally a fixed quantity, and though we habitually speak of days and years as giving the real measure of time, and of our own expe rience of its duration as only apparent, this is merely for the convenience of using a common standard, with which indeed nature has kindly provided us: But in this case, as in that of the dead languages, the convenience of a common medium of communication is balanced by the necessity of translation and correction, and by the inaccuracy with which it often represents the speaker's real meaning. In thinking of our own past or future we naturally drop it, and measure time by its contents, not by the number of nights by which it may have been intersected. In this sense it is no bad compliment to the most agreeable of companions to say that the time which has been spent with them seems long; the best company is that in which time flies the fastest while present, and expands the most when past. A curious instance of the reverse is afforded by sleepless nights, which pass perhaps more slowly, and yet contract afterwards into more insignificant dimensions, than any other periods of similar nominal length.

The apparent distance of any particular point of time is the result of an unconscious calculation of these two elements

namely, the rate of movement of the interval, and the space occupied in the mind by intervening events; and of their combination with a third-namely, the degree of our sympathy with our self of that date. People often say, "How long ago that seems, and yet it might have been yesterday!" Keenness of memory thus makes the past seem long in one sense and short in another; distending it with a crowd of recollections and yet bringing the furthest point of it within easy reach. And the vividness of those recollections depends very much upon the degree in which one's point

of view remains unchanged. To keep the past really fresh, one must not only remember its events clearly, but be able to enter into the feelings which they excited at the time. It is one of the penalties of frequent and violent changes of mind that they tend to confuse if not to obliterate past experience. Nothing makes any time seem so far away as to have since then passed through great revolutions of feeling to have adopted a different standard, especially to have lost one's hold on what then seemed real. It is to this cause that the most sudden and violent expansions of time are due. A day in which the morning seems before night to have been left behind years ago, is a day in which some great change has been made in one's position or state of mind; probably a day in which some great loss has been sustained, which has put a deep chasm between the past and the present. People are more aged by what they lose than by what they gain, or even by what they suffer. The youngest people are not those who have gone through least, but those who have retained most. The loss of sympathy with one's own past, and therefore with that of others, is one of the special dangers of advancing years, but happily experience shows that it is by no means an inevitable accompaniment of age. A firm hold on the past is to a life almost what the root is to a tree; without it, the present, instead of growing on in its place, is cut adrift like a wandering sea-weed. Happily the natural elasticity of time is sufficient, when no links have been snapped by violent means, to bring the past very near to the oldest of us.

in the visible world; in fact, it has always proved its dependence upon influences of this order. Born and nurtured not at hazard on any spot, but only in chosen regions, it finds at hand, for giving utterance to the mysteries of the inner life, an abundance of material symbols, fit for purposes of this kind, among the objects of sense. It is the function of poetry to effect such an assimilation of the material with the immaterial as shall produce one world of thought and of emotion-the visible and invisible, intimately commingled.

Poetry, nursed on the lap of Nature, will have its preferences-it must make its selection-and this not merely as to the exterior decorations of its abode, but even as to the solid framework of the country which it favors; there must be not only a soil, and a climate, and a various vegetation favorable to its training, but a preparation must have been made for it in the remotest geological eras. The requirements of a land destined to be the home of poetry have in all instances been very peculiar; it has sprung up and thriven on countries of a very limited extent-upon areas ribbed and walled about by ranges of mountains, or girdled and cut into by seas. It has never appeared in regions which oppress the spirit by a dreary sameness, or by shapeless magnitudes, or featureless sublimity. Poetry has had its birth, and it has sported its childhood, and it has attained its manhood, and has blended itself with the national life, in countries such as Greece, with its rugged hills, and its myrtle groves, and its sparkling rills, but not in Egypt-in Italy, but not in the dead levels of northern Europe. Poetry was born and reared in Palestine, but not in Mesopotamia-in Persia, but not in India. Pre-eminently has poetry found its home among the rural groves of England and amid the glens of Scotland, and there, rather than in those nighboring countries which are not inferior to the British Islands in any other products of intellect or of taste. But more especially Palestine-which_five English counties, Northumberland, Durham, Yorkshire, Lancashire, and Lincolnshire would more than cover-brings within its narrow limits more varieties of surface, and of aspect, and of tempera

tainly anything but a sinecurist. His duty-which, according to the unanimous consent of his visitors, he performs with equal zeal and courtesy-is to act as guide to the succession of inquirers attracted by the thousand secrets which lie hidden, or have until very recently lain hidden, in his choked-up treasure-house. The liberal spirit evinced in this respect by the Spanish Government, at Simancas as well as at Madrid, is indeed above all praise. True, Spain has excellent reason for thus avenging herself upon her monarchs, by allowing them to condemn themselves as it were from their own mouths. Had Philip II. foreseen that he was writing, docketing, and margining his endless piles of despatches for the benefit of a M. Gachard, and, through a M. Gachard, of a Mr. Motley, it may be reasonably doubted whether even the indefatigable industry of the royal scribe would not have occasionally slackened. Though the activity of Charles V. (whom tradition credits with having been perfectly satisfied with four hours sleep out of the twenty-four) was by no means confined to the reading and writing of despatches, yet his pen was only less prolix than that of his son, who successfully managed to caricature the method as well as the policy of his father's rule.

At the time when Mr. Bergenroth was pursuing his laborious investigations at Simancas, another scholar was working upon the same spot, and upon kindred subjects. M. Maurenbrecher has long devoted his attention to what he not inappropriately terms "the Catholic-counter-Reformation and the offensive operations of Catholic Europe against the countries which had accepted Protestantism, in the second half of the sixteenth century." He is apparently a pupil of the illustrious Ranke, whose unerring sagacity had already anticipated many of the conclusions which are fast growing into axioms of historical truth. M. Maurenbrecher's previous publications are such as to induce us to look forward with no ordinary interest to his contemplated history of Philip II., to be founded on and accompanied by documentary evidence collected at London, Paris, Madrid, and Simancas. In the meantime remembering that life is short, and that with German, no more than with Cam

bridge, professors do intentions invariably ripen into publications-we congratulate him on having already given to the world a volume which is valuable in itself, and may eventually serve as an introduction to one of the most important portions of a more comprehensive work.

What

The monograph of Charles V. and the German Protestants constitutes a narative, at once copious and clear, of the great but unsuccessful effort of the Emperor to put down Protestantism in Germany. For such, we are fully convinced, was the constant aim of Charles's policy. We believe that whoever desires clearly to understand the main current of German history in the middle of the sixteenth century, and at the same time to arrive at a consistent appreciation of the motives which animated the principal actor in that period, should above all hold fast to the fact that Charles V. never swerved from his allegiance to the Roman Catholic Church. Very different indeed were the means by which he at different times endeavored to put an end to the mighty secession from her communion. He tried persuasion, and when persuasion had failed he tried force, not, however, without occasionally recurring to the former method, when circumstances appeared to call for it. ever fanaticism there may have been in his principles, there was no fanatical hotheadedness in his mode of action. Whatever duplicity there may have been in. his mode of action, it was at all events not duplicity of principle or purpose. Such duplicity existed, indeed, but not in the Emperor's tent or cabinet. The fact that, parallel with his determination to recover the lost ground of the Church, ran his resolve to subject Germany and Italy to the permanent rule of a Spanish dynasty, converted his natural allies into covert or open enemies. The treason of Maurice of Saxony found a support not only in the venal ambition of Francis of France, but also in the discontent (to employ no stronger term) of the Emperor's own brother and subsequent successor on the Imperial throne. And—a fact at first sight seemingly most paradoxical of all, though in truth it was merely a logical sequence from the essential nature of the Imperial policy-no trust could be placed by Charles in the support of