Alas! it is not till Time, with reckless hand, has torn out half the leaves from the Book of Human Life to light the fires of human passion with, from day to day, that man begins to see that the leaves which remain are few in number.
A handful of red sand from the hot clime
Of Arab deserts brought,
Within this glass becomes the spy of Time,
The minister of Thought.
What we want, we have for our pains
The promise that if we but wait
Till the want has burned out of our brains,
Every means shall be present to state;
While we send for the napkin the soup gets cold,
While the bonnet is trimming the face grows old,
When we've matched our buttons the pattern is sold,
And everything comes too late—too late.
Volat hora per orbem.
The hours fly around in a circle.
Æquo stat fœdare tempus.
Time stands with impartial law.
But at my back I always hear
Time's winged chariot hurrying near.
Such phantom blossoms palely shining
Over the lifeless boughs of Time.
E. L. Masters—Spoon River Anthology.
Russell Kincaid.
The signs of the times.
Matthew. XVI. 3.
Time is a feathered thing,
And, whilst I praise
The sparkling of thy looks, and call them rays,
Takes wing,
Leaving behind him as he flies
An unperceivSd dimness in thine eyes.
Jasper Mayne—Time.
However we pass Time, he passes still,
Passing away whatever the pastime,
And, whether we use him well or ill,
Some day he gives us the slip for the last time.
Who can undo
What time hath done? Who can win back the wind?
Beckon lost music from a broken lute?
Renew the redness of a last year's rose?
Or dig the sunken sunset from the deep?
When time is flown, how it fled
It is better neither to ask nor tell,
Leave the dead moments to bury their dead.
Time, eftsoon will tumble
All of us together like leaves in a gust,
Humbled indeed down into the dust.
Joaquin Miller—Fallen Leaves Down into
the Dust. St. 5.
Time will run back and fetch the age of gold.
Day and night,
Seed-time and harvest, heat and hoary frost
Shall hold their course, till fire purge all things new.
Le temps . . . souverain médecin de nos passions.
Time is the sovereign physician of our passions.
Time softly there
Laughs through the abyss of radiance with the gods.
W. V. Moody—The Fire-Bringer. Act I.
A wonderful stream is the river of Time
As it runs through the realms of tears, With a faultless rhythm and musical rhyme, And a broader sweep and a surge sublime, And blends with the ocean of years. Appeared in Moore's Rural New Yorker. May 31, 1856, probably from Whtte Melville's Uncle John. </poem>
Time, still as he flies, adds increase to her truth,
And gives to her mind what he steals from her
youth.
Edward Moore—The Happy Marriage.
Surely in a matter of tihis kind we should endeavor to do something, that we may say that
we have not lived in vain, that we may leave
some impress of ourselves on the sands of time.
From an alleged Letter of Napoleon to his
Minister of the Interior on the Poor Laws.
Pub. in The Press, Feb. 1, 1868.
For each age is a dream that is dying,
Or one that is coming to birth.
Arthur O'Shaughnessy—Ode. We are the
Music Makers.
Labitur occulte, fallitque volubilis setas,
Ut celer admissis labitur amnis aquis.
Time steals on and escapes us, like the swift
river that glides on with rapid stream.
Ovid—Amorum. I. 8. 49.
