Infinite is the swiftness of time, says Seneca, as seen by those who are looking back at time past. Infinita est velocitas temporis, quæ magis apparet respicientibus. Looked forward to, it is another matter altogether. As Cowper has it, when retracing the windings of his way through many years,—
“Short as in retrospect the journey seems,
It seemed not always short; the rugged path,
And prospect oft so dreary and forlorn,
Moved many a sigh at its disheartening length.”
But as Cowper elsewhere draws the contrast, in the Latin motto he wrote for the king’s clock,—
“Quæ lenta accedit, quam velox præterit hora!”
(Slow comes the hour; its passing speed how great!—so Hayley Englished the line.) “Since this new epoch in my life,” writes Schleiermacher on a certain occasion, “time seems to fly twice as quickly as before, and I can quite fancy that when Jatte and I are grown old and grey, we shall still feel as if only a few days had gone by.” Moore was in his sixtieth year when Lord John Russell talked with him of the speed with which time seems to fly; and Moore records in his Diary the question he put, “If you find it so now, what will you say of it when you are as old as I am?” The “peculiar melancholy” of the answer given is emphasised in the same journal.
Another retrospective reviewer pictures our race as struggling ever onward, toiling up towards some air-built goal never to be attained—while the past crumbles instantly away behind our steps, like the staircase of the Epicurean, as we advance in our progress; and every step, which was of such magnitude when we passed it, is forgotten in the “collectiveness of retrospection,” insomuch that at times a passing thought would compass the events of years.
Few and evil the patriarch declares the days of the years of his pilgrimage to have been, when, in answer to Pharaoh’s “How old art thou?” the answer is, A hundred and thirty years. Man that is born of a woman is of few days, said another patriarch, and full of trouble. His days are swifter than a post, they flee away, they see no good. They are passed away as the swift ships; they are swifter than a weaver’s shuttle. Festinat enim decurrere velox Flosculus angustæ miseræque brevissima vitæ Portio. And thus in Juvenal’s pregnant phrase, obrepit non intellecta senectus. Or, as with the ageing subject of the Three Warnings,—