And yet notwithstanding the connection of these two ideas,—of time and of eternity,—(the notion of the former being only reached through the latter) we deal familiarly, and even jestingly, with the one, while the mind approaches the other with reverential awe. Types, and symbols, and emblems—and those ever of a grave meaning—are the most palpable expressions which we venture to give to our conceptions of the one; whilst the other we figure and personify,—and that, too often, after a fashion in which the better part of the moral is left unrepresented. Yet who shall personify time? And who that has ever tried it, in the silence of his chamber and the stillness of his heart, hath not bowed down in breathless awe before the solemn visions which his conjuration has awakened? Oh, the mysterious shapes which Time takes, when it rises up into the mind as an image, at those hours of lonely inquisition!—"And he said unto her, 'What form is he of?' And she said, 'An old man cometh up; and he is covered with a mantle.'"—The mysterious presence which it assumes "in thoughts from the visions of the night, when deep sleep falleth on men"! Who, as he strove to collect the mournful attributes about which his fancy had been busy into an impersonation, hath not suddenly felt as if "a spirit passed before his face! . . . It stood still, but he could not discern the form thereof; an image was before his eyes, there was silence;" and out of that silence hath seemed to come a voice like that which whispered to Job, "They that dwell in houses of clay, whose foundation is in the dust, which are crushed before the moth, they are destroyed from morning to evening; they perish for ever, without any regarding it."
Time, abstractedly considered as what in truth it is,—a portion of the vast ocean of eternity, a river flowing from the sea and flowing to the sea, a channel leading from deep to deep, through shores on which the races of the world are permitted to build for awhile, until the great waters shall once more cover all, and time, as time, "shall be no more,"—must long have defied the skill of man to map out its surface, and write his memorials upon its impalpable bosom. The thousand keels that sweep over the visible waters of the world leave on their face traces of their passage more legible and enduring than do the generations of men as they come and go on that viewless and voiceless stream. The ingenuity which has taught man to lay down the plan of the material ocean, to assign to each spot on its uniform surface its positive whereabout and actual relation, and by a series of imaginary lines and figures to steer his way across its pathless solitudes with a knowledge as certain as that which guides him amidst the substantive and distinctive features of the solid earth, is scarcely more admirable than that which, by a similar device, has enabled him to measure out the expanse of the silent river, to cover, as it were, its surface with a crowd of imaginary latitudes and longitudes intersecting each other at all points, and to ascertain at any moment, by observation, his relative position on the great stream of time.
How long the unaided genius of man might have been ere it could have fallen upon a scheme for the one achievement or the other, if left to struggle with its own resources and unassisted by hints from without, we need not conjecture. But in each case the solution of the problem was suggested to him, as the materials for working it are still furnished, by the finger of God himself. The great architect of the universe hath planted in its frame all necessary models and materials for the guidance and use of its human inhabitants, leaving them to the exercise of those powers and capacities with which they have been furnished to improve the lessons and apply the examples thus conveyed. In each of the cases of which we have spoken, the constellations which surround the world and "are the poetry of heaven" have been the sources of the inspiration, as they are still the lights by which that inspiration works. The hand that fashioned the "two great lights," and appointed to them their courses, and gave them to be "for signs and for seasons and for days and years," pointed out to man how he might, by the observation of their revolutions, direct his course along the unbroken stream of time or count its waves as they flowed silently and ceaselessly away. The sun and moon were the ancient and at first the only measures of time, as they are the essential foundations of all the modes by which man measures it now; and in the order of the world's architecture, the "watches of the element" which guide us yet were framed and "set in the firmament of heaven" at that distant and uncertain period whose "evening and morning were the fourth day."
Nor did the beneficent power which erected these great meters of time in the constitution of the universe leave the world without suggestions how their use might be improved in the business of more minute subdivision. The thousand natural inequalities of the earth's surface, and the vegetable columns which spring from its bosom, furnish—as do the spires and towers and columns which man rears thereon—so many gnomons of the vast dial, on which are unerringly written with the finger of shadow the shining records of the sky. There is something unutterably solemn in watching the shade creep, day by day, round a circle whose diameter man might measure with his grave or even cover with his hand, and contrasting the limits within which it acts with the spaces of time which its stealing tread measures out, and feeling that it is the faithful index of a progress before which the individual being and the universal frame of things are alike hastening to rapid and inevitable decay. There are few types more awfully representative of that which they typify than is the shadow. It is Time almost made visible. Through it the mind reaches the most vivid impersonation of that mysterious idea which it is capable of containing. It seems as if flung directly from his present and passing wing. The silent and ceaseless motion—gliding for ever on and on, coming round again and again, but reverting never and tarrying never, blotting out the sunshine as it passes and leaving no trace where it has passed—make it the true and solemn symbol of him (the old unresting and unreturning one) who receded not, even when that same shadow went back on the dial of the king of Judah, nor paused when the sun stood still in the midst of heaven and the moon lingered over the valley of Ajalon! Of that mysterious type and its awful morals a lost friend of ours[1] has already spoken better than we can hope to speak; and as he is ("alas, that he is so!") already one whose "sun shall no more go down, neither shall his moon withdraw itself," we will avail ourselves of a language which deserves to be better known, and sounds all the more solemnly that he who uttered it hath since furnished in his own person a fresh verification of the solemn truths which he sung so well.
"Upon a dial-stone,
Behold the shade of Time,
For ever circling on and on
In silence more sublime
Than if the thunders of the spheres
Pealed forth its march to mortal ears!
"It meets us hour by hour,
Doles out our little span,
Reveals a presence and a power
Felt and confessed by man:
The drop of moments, day by day,
That rocks of ages wears away.
"Woven by a hand unseen
Upon that stone, survey
A robe of dark sepulchral green,
The mantle of decay,
The fold of chill oblivion's pall,
That falleth with yon shadow's fall!
"Day is the time for toil,
Night balms the weary breast,
Stars have their vigils, seas awhile
Will sink to peaceful rest;
But round and round the shadow creeps
Of that which slumbers not, nor sleeps!
"Effacing all that's fair,
Hushing the voice of mirth
Into the silence of despair,
Around the lonesome hearth,
And training ivy-garlands green
O'er the once gay and social scene.
"In beauty fading fast
Its silent trace appears,
And where—a phantom of the past,
Dim in the mist of years—
Gleams Tadmor o'er oblivion's waves,
Like wrecks above their ocean-graves.
"Before the ceaseless shade
That round the world doth sail
Its towers and temples bow the head,
The pyramids look pale,
The festal halls grow hushed and cold,
The everlasting hills wax old!
"Coeval with the sun
Its silent course began,
And still its phantom-race shall run,
Till worlds with age grow wan,
Till darkness spread her funeral pall,
And one vast shadow circle all!"
To the great natural divisions of time (with their aid, and guided by these hints) the ingenuity of man, under the direction of his wants, has been busy since the world began in adding artificial ones, while his heart has been active in supplying impulses and furnishing devices to that end. Years, and months, and days—the periods marked out by the revolutions of our celestial guides—have been aggregated and divided after methods almost as various as the nations of the earth. Years have been composed into cycles and olympiads and generations and reigns, and months resolved into decades and weeks, days into hours, and hours into subdivisions which have been again subdivided almost to the confines of thought. Yet it is only in these latter ages of the world that a measurement has been attained, at once so minute and so closely harmonizing with the motions and regulated by the revolutions of the dials of the sky, that, had the same machinery existed from the commencement of time,—with the art of printing to preserve its results,—the history of the past might be perused, with its discrepancies reconciled and many of its blanks supplied. And could the world agree upon its uniform adoption now, together with that of a common epoch to reckon from, comparative chronology would be no longer a science applicable to the future; and history, for the time to come (in so far as it is a mere record of facts), would present few problems but such as "he who runs may read."
But out of these conventional and multiplied divisions of time, these wheels within the great wheel, arise results far more important than the verification of a chronological series or the establishment of the harmonies of history. Through them not only may the ages of the world be said to intercommunicate, and the ends of the earth in a sense to meet, but by their aid the whole business of the life of nations and of individuals is regulated, and a set of mnemonics established upon which hinges the history of the human heart. By the multiplied but regular system of recurrences thus obtained, order is made to arise out of the web of duties and the chaos of events; and at each of the thousand points marked out on these concentric circles are written their appropriate duties and recorded their special memories. The calendar of every country is thus covered over with a series of events whose recollection is recalled and influence kept alive by the return of the cycles, in their ceaseless revolution, to those spots at which the record of each has been written; and acts of fasting or of festival, of social obligation or of moral observance,—many of which would be surely lost or overlooked, amidst the inextricable confusion in which, without this systematic arrangement, they must be mingled,—are severally pointed out by the moving finger of Time as he periodically reaches the place of each on his concentric dials.