Wicked Time, that all good thoughts doth waste,
And workes of noblest wits to naught outweare.
The present section partakes much of the aphoristic character, which has its recommendatory advantages.—Bacon says: “Aphorisms representing a knowledge broken do invite men to inquire further; whereas methods, carrying the show of a total, do secure men as if they were at farthest.” Again: “Nor do apophthegms only serve for ornament and delight, but also for action and civil use, as being the edge-tools of speech, which cut and penetrate the knots of business and affairs.”
Coleridge is of opinion that, exclusively of the Abstract Sciences, the largest and worthiest portion of our knowledge consists of Aphorisms; and the greatest and best of men is but an Aphorism.
“Truths, of all others the most awful and interesting, are too often considered as so true, that they lose all the power of truth, and lie bedridden in the dormitory of the soul, side by side with the most despised and exploded errors.
“There is one way of giving freshness and importance to the most commonplace maxims,—that of reflecting on them in direct reference to our own state and conduct, to our own past and future being.”
Mature and sedate wisdom has been fond of summing up the results of its experience in weighty sentences. Solomon did so; the wise men of India and Greece did so; Bacon did so; Goethe in his old age took delight in doing so.
Lucretius has his philosophical view of Time, which Creech has thus Englished:
Time of itself is nothing, but from Thought
Receives its rise, by lab’ring fancy wrought