Fare thee well at once!
The glow-worm shows the matin to be near
And gins to pale his uneffectual fire.
Hamlet.
But look! The morn, in russet mantle clad,
Walks o'er the dew of yon high eastern hill:--
Break we our watch up.
Hamlet.
Light thickens, and the crow
Makes wing to the rooky wood.
Macbeth.
Such picturesque notations of time as these, are in the works of Shakespeare, as thick as autumnal leaves that strew the brooks in Valombrosa. In one of his Sonnets he thus counts the years of human life by the succession of the seasons.
To me, fair friend, you never can be old,
For as you were when first your eye I eyed,
Such seems your beauty still. Three winters cold
Have from the forests shook three summers' pride;
Three beauteous springs to yellow autumn turned
In process of the seasons have I seen;
Three April's perfumes in three hot Junes burned
Since first I saw you fresh which yet are green.
Grainger, a prosaic verse-writer who once commenced a paragraph of a poem with "Now, Muse, let's sing of rats!" called upon the slave drivers in the West Indies to time their imposition of cruel tasks by the opening and closing of flowers.
Till morning dawn and Lucifer withdraw
His beamy chariot, let not the loud bell
Call forth thy negroes from their rushy couch:
And ere the sun with mid-day fervor glow,
When every broom-bush opes her yellow flower,
Let thy black laborers from their toil desist:
Nor till the broom her every petal lock,
Let the loud bell recal them to the hoe,
But when the jalap her bright tint displays,
When the solanum fills her cup with dew,
And crickets, snakes and lizards gin their coil,
Let them find shelter in their cane-thatched huts.