"The Goth, the Christian, time, war, flood and fire
Have dealt upon the seven hill'd city's pride,"

and sees that the temple upon the Tarpeian mount has been overthrown and rifled, and the brier and the bramble have come back again, that owl answers owl upon the Palatine, that the din of arms and the active bustle and hum of citizens and functionaries of imperial Rome, have ceased forever on the Appian and Emilian ways, that no stately triumph mounts the Capitoline hill, to administer to the insatiate ambition of the rapacious and remorseless Roman, that

"Cypress, and ivy, weed and wall flower grown
Matted and massed together, hillocks heap'd
On what were chambers, arch'd crush'd, columns strown
In fragments, choked up vaults, and frescos steep'd
In subterranean damps,"

now meets his eye where'er it turns. Well may he exclaim with such a prospect before him, in the language of the same poet,

"The Niobe of nations! there she stands,
Childless and crownless in her voiceless woes.
* * * * *
Alas! the lofty city! and alas!
The trebly hundred triumphs! and the day
When Brutus made the dagger's edge surpass
The conqueror's sword, in bearing fame away.
Alas for Tully's voice, and Virgil's lay,
And Livy's pictured page!"

When he sees all these mutations and revolutions on a single spot of earth, in the hour of his meditations his mind reverts to Him who alone is immutable and unchangeable, upon whose brow, time writes no wrinkles. "Alas, the pride of man goes down with him into the dust! it withers when the lamp of his transient existence flickers out into the long slumbering of the tomb." Eternal youth, eternal majesty, eternal duration, belong only to the great, the unchangeable I AM. The bustling transitory career of the mighty of the earth, when duly contemplated, should but the more strongly impress on the mind the infinity, eternity, and omnipotence of Deity. "Where now are they who sounded the clarion of war along the plains of Thessaly, the mount of Marathon and Samos's rocky isle. The trumpet's voice hath died upon the breeze; the thousands which it aroused have gone to rest; the castles which have been subdued and won, on whose walls the spear glittered and the cannon pealed, have crumbled into dust; the ivy lingers about the decaying turrets; the raven builds her nest in the casement, and sends upon the ear of midnight her desolate wailings; the owl hoots where the song was heard; and man, proud man, who once fought and won—he who reared the structure,"

"Sleeps where all must sleep."

There is religion, yes a deep abiding religion in such a retrospect as this, and the mind which can trace back in its reflections the history of man along the pathway of ages, and see how dynasties have been overthrown, and thrones crumbled, how nations have risen, flourished for a day, then have declined and fallen, and been numbered among the things that are past and gone, cannot fail to turn, upon the principle of contrast, to the God of nature, whose throne is eternal, and whose dominion can never pass away.

Such may be the salutary effect of the reflection of man, when man reflects. Let us now turn to woman, and see the character of her meditations and reflections. She perhaps may not, in her solitary musing, so much delight, as man, to look to the history of nations, and draw the mighty moral from their fluctuations and vicissitudes. But there are scenes around her—there are events constantly occurring in her own limited sphere, which much more frequently, upon the principles just explained, excite her meditations, and lead her on to religious devotion. Woman, as I before remarked, is the tender, constant, and affectionate nurse of our race. Hers is the heavenly office to watch the sorrows of man and mitigate them, by her sweet, her benevolent ministrations.

"The very first
Of human life must spring from woman's breast.
Your first small words are taught you from her lips,
Your first tears quenched by her, and your last sighs
Too often breathed out in woman's hearing,
When men have shrunk from the ignoble care
Of watching the last hour of him who led them."