Annis

“ The Greeks and Romans had a great system of cycles and ages, not unlike the Hindu Kalpas and Manvantaras. One cycle follows another, the beginning of each being marked by the sun, moon and stars all occupying their original positions. The Roman phrase for cycle is “great year.” Each great year is subdivided into “months,” that is ages. The first age of each great year is the golden, when Saturn reigns, and a divine race of men occupies the earth; the last is the iron age, when Apollo reigns, and men are sinful. ”

“ I heard the New Year whisper, passing by,
"I am the Old Year, and did never die.
"As phenix bird, that from the sunset springs,
Next in the East replumes his wondrous wings,
"As dewdrop trembling in the morning flower,
Exhaled ere noon, returns at evening hour,
"So never lost was I, though steeple chime
Hurl out my knell—for I, behold, am Time!
"The Years but lend so many a quaint disguise
Wherein I masquerade to mortal eyes." ”

“ We walked by their side, and we told them each grief,
And they kissed off our tears while they whispered relief;
And the stories of hearts that may not be revealed
In the hearts of the dead years are buried and sealed.
Let the New Year sing
At the Old Year's grave:
Will the New Year bring
What the Old Year gave?
Ah! the Stranger-Year trips over the snows,
And his brow is wreathed with many a rose:
But how many thorns do the roses conceal
Which the roses, when withered, shall so soon reveal?
Let the New Year smile
When the Old Year dies ”

“ Now of what concern is it that those who shall be born hereafter should speak of you, when you were spoken of by none who were born before you, who were not fewer, and certainly were better men?—especially, too, when among those who might hear our names there is not one that can retain the memories of a single year. Men, indeed, ordinarily measure the year only by the return of the sun, that is, one star, to its place; but when all the stars, after long intervals, shall resume their original places in the heavens, then that completed revolution may be truly called a year. ”

“ God help the poor, when December’s snows are upon the earth!
On such a night as this, the Old and New Year met—both struggling for supremacy—each unwilling to accord to the other unlimited sway.
“I have been, and I am yet a monarch,” said the Old Year; “one, too, whose subjects are almost countless. You may not number the tongues which have sung of my exploits; and the length of days which has been mine has given me a knowledge and wisdom, of which thou knowest nothing. What? resign my throne to thee, thou stripling! never!!” ”

“ As we go on in life, anniversaries become rather melancholy affairs. The turn of the year—the annual return of the day—birthdays or death-days or set festal occasions like Christmas or the New Year, bring reminders of loss and change. ”

“ Between tears and smiles, the year, like the child, struggles into the warmth of life. The old year—say what the chronologists will—lingers upon the very lap of spring, and is only fairly gone when the blossoms of April have strown their pall of glory upon his tomb, and the bluebirds have chanted his requiem. ”

“ Every ancient nation has thus its calendar filled with joyful days. The worshippers of Jesus delight in their Christmas and their Easter; the Mahometans, in the Hegira of the Prophet. The year-book of mankind is thus marked all the way through with the red-letter days of history. And most beautifully do those days illuminate the human year, commemorating the victories of the race, the days of triumph which have marked the course of man in his long and varied, but yet triumphant, march of many a thousand years. ”

“ But the Age of Elizabeth, and the Age of Queen Anne, have passed into the conventional dialect of chronology: and although it is less than twenty years since the death of Queen Victoria, we can feel little doubt that, for generations to come, the historian will speak of the Victorian Age.
If we use the term Age, as we do in this context, in the sense of a particular and defined phase in the development of the nation, its boundaries obviously cannot be measured with the precision of an astronomical calendar. ”

“ If we simply continue to reckon the days according to our present arrangement of the year, calling each fourth year a leap-year of 366 days, and assign to each hundredth year 365 days—although it ought to be a leap-year, according to the four-year cycle—and again to each four hundredth year 366 days, we shall be certain to remain for thousands of years in such agreement with the sun that we do not need to concern ourselves in the least in the times of his revolution and positions in the heavens. ”

“ Lunar year, a period of twelve lunar months or 354 days, Platonic year, a cycle of years at the end of which the heavenly bodies are in the same place as at the Creation—also Great, or Perfect, year; Sabbatic, -al, year (see Sabbath) ; Sidereal year, the period required by the sun to move from a given star to the same star again—affected by Nutation only, one of the most invariable quantities which nature affords us, having a mean value of 365 days, 6 hours, 9 minutes, 9.6 seconds.—In years, advanced in age. ”

“ Each year in this world represents about two hundred terrestrial years. Two thirds of the year is lived [42] in the lower condition, one third (winter) in the chrysalis state, and the following spring the sleepers feel life coming back to their transformed flesh; they stir, awaken, leave their fleecy coverings on the trees, and freeing themselves from them, fly away, wonderful winged creatures, to aerial regions, there to live for a new Phœnician year,—that is, for two hundred years of our swiftly moving planet. ”

“ To fill the days up of his dateless year
Flame from Queen Helen to Queen Guenevere?
For first of all the sphery signs whereby
Love severs light from darkness, and most high,
In the white front of January there glows
The rose-red sign of Helen like a rose:
And gold-eyed as the shore-flower shelterless
Whereon the sharp-breathed sea blows bitterness,
A storm-star that the seafarers of love
Strain their wind-wearied eyes for glimpses of,
Shoots keen through February’s grey frost and damp
The lamplike star of Hero for a lamp;
The star that Marlowe sang into our skies
With mouth of gold, and morning in his eyes; ”

“ The year was growing to be an old man. It looked back at spring, at the early days when it first felt the promises of life's glory and scarcely dared believe them true, at laughing May, at wide and spacious June, and then the turning of the year. ”

“ As each year is marked by one of the signs and one of the elements at the same time, sixty years form a complete cycle, after which the same combinations of the signs and elements are repeated. In horoscopy, every one of these sixty years has distinctive features. The elemental nature of the years is of importance in determining the disposition of those born therein. The relations between a husband and a wife are by dabblers in horoscopy deduced simply from their nativities and the difference in their ages. ”

“ The Confessions of The Year The gray old year—the dying year,
His sands were well nigh run;
When there came by one in priestly weed,
To ask of the deeds he'd done.
“Now tell me, ere thou treadst the path
Thy brethren all have trode,
The scenes that life has shown to thee
Upon thine onward road.”
“I've seen the sunbeam rise and set,
As it rose and set before
And the hearts of men bent earthwardly,
As they have been evermore ”

“ In the volume of “Elia,” an excellent paper begins with “Every man hath two birthdays: two days, at least, in every year, which set him upon revolving the lapse of time, as it affects his mortal duration. The one is that which in an especial manner he termeth his. In the gradual desuetude of old observances, this custom of solemnizing our proper birthday hath nearly passed away, or is left to children, who reflect nothing at all about the matter, nor understand any thing beyond the cake and orange. But the birth of a new year is of an interest too wide to be pretermitted by king or cobbler. ”

“ For the old year lies a-dying.
⁠Old year, you must not die;
⁠You came to us so readily,
⁠You lived with us so steadily,
⁠Old year, you shall not die.
ii.
He lieth still: he doth not move:
He will not see the dawn of day.
He hath no other life above.
He gave me a friend, and a true true-love,
And the New-year will take 'em away. ”

“ Nothing is more equivocal among the ancients, than the term year. It always has been, and still is, a source of disputes among the learned, whether on account of its duration, its beginning, or its end. Some people heretofore made their year consist only of one month, others of four, others of six, others of ten, and others of twelve. Some have divided one of our years into two, and have made one year of winter, another of summer. The beginning of the year was fixed sometimes at autumn, sometimes at the spring, and sometimes at midwinter. Some people have used lunar months, others solar. ”

“ Astronomical year, the interval between one vernal equinox and the next, or one complete mean apparent circuit of the ecliptic by the sun, or mean motion through 360° of longitude—365 days, 5 hours, 48 minutes, 49.7 seconds—called also the Equinoctial, Solar, or Tropical year; Canicular year—the ancient Egyptian—counted from one heliacal rising of Sirius to the next— (the Canicular Cycle was the cycle of 1461 years of 365 days each, or 1460 Julian years, also called the Sothiac period) ; Ecclesiastical year, the year as arranged in the ecclesiastical calendar, with saints' days, festivals, &c. ”

“ Would the dead world revive, or would it not? The Old Year was dead; would the New Year, the Young King, born afresh of Sky and Earth, come in the Old King's place and bring with him the new growth and the hope of life? ”

“ To me ’tis but the Old Year’s dying knell.
O, dear old friend, the hour has come at last
When I must say farewell for aye to thee.
New Years may come and Old Years pass away,
But you will never be forgot by me. ”

“ Whether the conception of the year was known in the Indo-European period is not certain: it is however significant that all the words for ‘year’ of which the etymology is fairly certain either refer to the produce of the year—as ὥρα and its cognates, and also the word ‘year’ itself, Old Scand. ár—or else come from the pars pro toto counting of the year. Thus the Slavonic leto means ‘summer’ and ‘year’. Sanskrit çarad means ‘autumn’: that the corresponding Avestic sared means ‘year’ is explained by the fact that the years were reckoned in autumns. ”

“ Romans, after the first day of the month, began to reckon so many days before the Nones, as 4th, 3d, 2d, then Nones; after the Nones, so many days before the Ides, as 8th, 7th, 6th, etc., and after the Ides, so many before the Calends of the next month, the highest numbers being reckoned first.
In reducing the Roman calendar to our own, it should be remembered that in reckoning backward from a fixed point, that the point of departure is counted; also, that the last day of the month is not the point from which the Calends are reckoned, but the first day of the following month. ”

“ They are a people of great longevity, for we met with many who had descendants of the fourth degree. Not knowing how to compute time, and counting neither days, months, nor years—excepting in so far as they count the lunar months—when they wanted to signify to us any particular duration of time, they did it by showing us a stone for each moon; and, computing in this manner, we discovered that the age of one man that we saw was seventeen hundred moons, or about one hundred and thirty-two years, reckoning thirteen moons to the year. ”

“ In India the Aryans of the Vedic age appear to have adopted a year of three hundred and sixty days, divided into twelve months of thirty days each, and to have remedied the annual deficiency of five days by intercalating a whole month of thirty days every fifth year, thus regulating their calendar according to a five years' cycle.781 The Celts of Gaul, as we learn from the Coligny calendar, also adopted a five years' cycle, but they managed it differently. ”

“ In the year that’s come and gone, dear, we wove a tether
All of gracious words and thoughts, binding two together.
In the year that’s coming on with its wealth of roses
We shall weave it stronger, yet, ere the circle closes.
p. 145In the year that’s come and gone, in the golden weather,
Sweet, my sweet, we swore to keep the watch of life together.
In the year that’s coming on, rich in joy and sorrow,
We shall light our lamp, and wait life’s mysterious morrow. ”

“ POPULAR MONTHS OF THE EUROPEAN PEOPLES. In ancient times, and even at the present day in lands which lie outside the path of the great leveller, civilisation, the months taken over with the Roman calendar are not numbered divisions of the year, the names of which are a matter of indifference, but are concretely conceived and named as seasons. They are, in fact, nothing but seasons, the number and duration of which are determined by the conventional calendar. ”

“ I knew a little girl who cherished as an undoubted article of faith a legend—how originated who can say?—perhaps suggested by some half poetical talk of her elders about the aging year, the year about to bid us farewell and so on, perhaps entirely evolved out of her own fantastic little brain—that on the 31st of December the “old year” took material human form and strolled about the world in the guise of an aged man, though unrecognised by the uninitiated crowd. ”