"Guilty of manslaughter, my lord," replied the foreman.
The eyes of Edgar Adelon turned dim, his brain reeled, and he fell back amongst the crowd without uttering a word.
CHAPTER XXVI.
Two years had passed.
Two years! What is it? who can say? Different to every being in the whole wide range of universal existence, Time is the true chameleon, and takes its colour entirely from the things through which it glides. Now gray and dull, now bright and shining, now purple with the mingled hues of exertion and success, rosy with love and hope, or azure with faith and confidence! Years, what are they? Nothing: for to many they have no existence; mere spots in the wide ocean of eternity, which realize the mathematician's utmost abstraction when he defines a point as that which hath no parts, or which hath no magnitude--neither length, breadth, nor thickness. Yet to others how important are years, how full of events, and feelings, and actions! How often is it that, in that short space of two years a life is crowded; so that when we look back at the end of mortal existence, there, gathered into those four and twenty months, stands out the whole of active being, and all the rest is idleness and emptiness, the broad selvages of the narrow strip of cloth.
Two years, too, viewed from different positions in the wide plain of life, how different do they appear! The prospective and the retrospective changes them entirely. It is the looking up and looking down a hill, for the perspective of time is very different from that of substantial objects. The vanishing point comes close to the eye when we gaze back; is far, far removed when we gaze forward. At every period of life, too, it changes, and with every feeling of the heart, with every passion of our nature. To the young man the two years just passed stretch far away, filled with incidents and sensations all bright in their novelty, and vivid to the eye of memory. To the old man they are but a space, and that space empty. He hardly believes that the time has flown which has brought him two strides nearer to the grave. Say to the eager and impetuous youth, two years must pass before you can possess her whom you love, and you spread out an eternity before him, full of dangers and disappointments. Tell the timid clinger to life's frail thread, you can but live two years longer, and the termination seems at the very door. Pain, pleasure, hope, fear, thought, study, care, anxiety, our moral habits, our corporeal sensations, our thirsty wishes, our replete indifference; all contract or expand the elastic sphere of time, and we find at last that it is but a phantasm, the sole existence of which is in change.
The sun, and the moon, and the stars, were given, we are told, to be for signs, and for seasons, and for days, and for years; and regularity was given to their motions, that order might be in variety; but variety is not less infinite because all is rendered harmonious, and regular recurrence only serves to work out spaces in the ever teeming progress of change. It is not alone that the vast whole does not present at any time two things exactly alike; but it is that all things in that whole, and the whole itself, are altering every instant, and every fraction of an instant, which gives us the infinity of variety. All is in movement, upon, throughout, and round the earth. All is undergoing change, but it is the vastness, the violence, the rapidity of that change, which marks time, or, in other words, marks the march of the shadow.
Two years had passed with their changes, and of those I shall speak hereafter. Suns had set and risen, day and night had been, months had succeeded weeks, hearts were cold that were then warm, eyes were dim that were then bright, the shade of gray had come upon the glossy hair, sickness and health had changed places in many a frame, states had seen revolutions, men had perished and been born, vice and virtue had triumphed or had failed, monarchs had died, and good and wise men passed away; shipwreck and flame, and war and pestilence, and accident and sorrow, had done their part; and bursting forth again from a thousand different sources, the teeming life of earth had sprung up and glittered in the sun, as if but the more abundant for that which had been abstracted from it. The world had grown older, but not less full; and those who had aided the work, and had undergone the change, were hardly conscious that it had taken place.
Two years had passed.