That slightly shakes his parting guest by th’ hand,
But with his arms outstretch’d, as he would fly,
Grasps the incomer.
Sir Walter Scott thus paints Time’s evanescence:
Time rolls his ceaseless course.—The race of yore,
Who danced our infancy upon their knee,
And told our marvelling boyhood legends store
Of their strange ’ventures happ’d by land or sea,
How are they blotted from the things that be!
Cowley has this significant couplet: