which after long absence we observe in those we love; the failure of power and vitality in the outward frame, the lessened vividness of the intellect we have admired, strike us with a sharp surprise of distress, and it is startling to have revealed suddenly to us, in the condition of others, how rapidly, powerfully, and unobservedly time has been dealing with ourselves.  But those who believe in eternity should be able to accept time, and the ruin of the altar from which the flame leaps up to heaven signifies little.

My father and I went to visit Macdonald’s collection of sculpture to-day.  I was very much pleased with some of the things; there are some good colossal figures, and an exquisite statue of a kneeling girl, that charmed me greatly; there are some excellent busts, too.  How wonderfully that irrevocable substance assumes the soft, round forms of life!  The color in its passionless purity (absence of color, I suppose I should say) is really harder than the substance itself of marble.  I could not fall in love with a statue, as the poor girl in Procter’s poem did with the Apollo Belvidere, though I think I could with a fine portrait:  how could one fall in love with what had no eyes!  Was it not Thorwaldsen who said that the three materials in which sculptors worked—­clay, plaster, and marble—­were like life, death, and immortality?  I thought my own bust (the one Macdonald executed in Edinburgh, you know) very good; the marble is beautiful, and I really think my friend did wonders with his impracticable subject; the shape of the head and shoulders is very pretty.  I wonder what Sappho was like!  An ugly woman, it is said; I do not know upon what authority, unless her own; but I wonder what kind of ugliness she enjoyed!  Among other heads, we saw one of Brougham’s mother, a venerable and striking countenance, very becoming the mother of the Chancellor of England.  There was a bust, too, of poor Mr. Huskisson, taken after death.  I heard a curious thing of him to-day:  it seems that on the night before the opening of the railroad, as he was sitting with some friends, he said, “I cannot tell what ails me; I have a strange weight on my spirits; I am sure something dreadful will happen to-morrow; I wish it were over;” and that, when they recapitulated all the precautions, and all the means that had been taken for security, comfort, and pleasure, all he replied was, “I wish to God it were over!” There is something awful in these stories of presentiments that always impresses me deeply—­this warning shadow, projected by no perceptible object, falling darkly and chilly over one; this indistinct whisper of destiny, of which one hears the sound, without distinguishing the sense; this muffled tread of Fate approaching us!

Did you read Horace Twiss’s speech on the Reform Bill?  Every one seems to think it was excellent, whether they agree with his opinions and sentiments or not.  I saw by the paper, to-day,