The morning answers to the spring, and the
spring to childhood and youth; the noon corresponds to the summer, and
the summer to the strength of manhood. The evening is an emblem of
autumn, and autumn of declining life. The night with its silence and
darkness shows the winter, in which all the powers of vegetation are
benumbed; and the winter points out the time when life shall cease, with
its hopes and pleasures.
He that is carried forward, however swiftly, by a motion equable and
easy, perceives not the change of place but by the variation of objects.
If the wheel of life, which rolls thus silently along, passed on through
undistinguishable uniformity, we should never mark its approaches to the
end of the course. If one hour were like another; if the passage of the
sun did not show that the day is wasting; if the change of seasons did
not impress upon us the flight of the year; quantities of duration equal
to days and years would glide unobserved. If the parts of time were not
variously coloured, we should never discern their departure or
succession, but should live thoughtless of the past, and careless of the
future, without will, and perhaps without power, to compute the periods
of life, or to compare the time which is already lost with that which
may probably remain.
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