Things to be Remembered in Daily Life With Personal Experiences and Recollections

TIME and Human Life are the staple subjects of the following pages. These are great matters for so small a book, and may remind you of the philosophical scheme of compressing th...

How truthfully has Dr. Johnson said: “So little do we accustom ourselves to consider the effects of time, that things necessary and certain often surprise us like unexpected con...

The Rev. W. Lisle Bowles was a sincere respecter of dials. In the garden of his parsonage at Bremhill he placed a Sun-dial—a small antique twisted column, gray with age, and bel...

But the Hour-glass is a better measurer of time than is generally imagined. The flow of the sand from one bulb to another is perfectly equable, whatever may be the quantity of s...

A certain dynamical theory of chemistry has been propounded, founded upon precipitations and decompositions taking place in a definite space. Time forms, too, the very key by wh...

Of his literary labours and self-denying life, writes a clergyman, “few can have any conception. I was frequently admitted to see him on business, even as early as six in the mo...

Boyle has these wholesome reflections upon _profuse talkers_: he tells us “that easiness of admitting all Kind of Company, provided men have boldness enough to intrude into ours...

The Spring-time of Life,—the meeting-point of the child and the man,—the brief interval which separates restraint from liberty,—has a warmth of life, which Dr. Temple thus pictu...

Buffon was seventy years of age (this was young for Buffon, he lived to eighty-one) when he wrote _The Epochs of Nature_, in which he calls old age a prejudice. Without our arit...

Gilbert Wakefield states that his wife’s great-grandfather and great-grandmother’s matrimonial connexion lasted seventy-five years: they died nearly at the same time, she at the...

In the parish of Skelton there was then living a man named Moon, 104 years old, who was blind, but managed a small farm till nearly or quite 100; and a blacksmith, named Robinso...

Old age can rarely withstand intense grief. John Tice, of Hagley, Worcestershire, having recovered from a fall out of a tree when he was 80 years old, and from being much burned...

Thus nature calls us to meditate of death by those things which are the instruments of acting it: and God by all the variety of his Providence makes us see death every where, in...

It is admitted that the highest eminence can only be attained by the concentration of the mind, with a piercing intensity and singleness of view, upon one field of action. In or...

It is not much more than seventy years since Bishop Watson, a man of no mean abilities and of no slight distinction, turned the science of geology into open ridicule. He said th...

The characters of writing have followed the genius of the barbarous ages: they are well or ill formed, in proportion as the sciences have flourished more or less. Antiquaries re...

“The toils as well as risks of an active life are commonly overrated, so much may be done by the diligent use of ordinary opportunities; but they must not always be waited for....

“Sir,—Our friend Mr. Addison telling me that he was to write to you to-night, I could not let his packet go away without letting you know how much I am concerned to find them re...

However, Bacon thought otherwise. “Let no man,” he says, “fear lest learning should expulse business; nay, rather, it will keep and defend the possessions of the mind against id...

Thomas Brassey, the railway contractor, is another remarkable instance of colossal labour. Born at Buerton in 1805, and educated at Chester, he commenced life as a surveyor at B...

Pianoforte-making has led to great money-making results. About the year 1776, Becker, a German, undertook to apply the pianoforte mechanism to the harpsichord, assisted by John...

Another humble practitioner of authorship had been driven to it by failure in business; and an undecided Chancery-suit had made him a pitiable, puling fellow; far less cheerful...

Henry Brougham was born in Edinburgh in 1779: his father was no extraordinary man, but his mother is described as a woman of talent and delightful character. The son was educate...

At last, after an interval of twenty-four years, which succeeded a tolerably intimate acquaintance of seven weeks, I saw Count Münster of Hanover again. We met like two ghosts t...

Much of the scepticism that we meet with is necessarily affectation or conceit; for it is as likely that the ignorant, weak, and indolent should become mathematicians as reasoni...

Professor Airy, however, considers this difficulty to be over-estimated. He observes, that “persons who take great interest in Astronomy appear to regard the determination of me...

It is impossible to say what analogy exists between the race and the individual, and attempts to explain the history of the one by the stages which mark the life of the other ar...

Lansdowne, the late Lord, on Public Speaking, 169. Lawyers, aged, 111. Length of Days, 80, 97. Letter-writing, 148. Life of Man, 251. Life—a River, 65. Linwood, Miss, her great...