Ora

“ Old man with the scythe and hour-glass, I defy thee! I will admit that three o’clock post meridian, requires much deliberation and cogitation, in order to give the millions of human marionettes, of whom I hold, temporarily, the strings, their suitable employment ”

“ The morning, which is the most memorable season of the day, is the awakening hour. Then there is least somnolence in us; and for an hour, at least, some part of us awakes which slumbers all the rest of the day and night. ”

“ Some Expositors finding mention of the dawning of the day, in this Parable, vers. 1. [238] They reckon the 4 quarters of the day after this manner. Hora prima, Hora tertia, Hora sexta, Hora nona. Where first they err, in taking the dawning of the day for the first hour of the day; for πρωὶ the dawning, signifieth the last quarter of the night, called the Morning watch. Secondly, they err in making the last quarter of the day to be the ninth hour, for what then shall become of the eleventh hour, mentioned in the same Parable? ”

“ Samoa still rises silently in moonlight out of the sea of my dreams. I can hear the barbarian orchestra clanging away down in the native village, as Samoan girls and youths, and two or three white men, waltz under the palms just below the plateau, where groves of orange-trees hang their golden fruit amongst dark leaves. As I play the violin the semi-savage people whirl to the wild rhythm of the forest ballroom music of a tribal waltz. ”

“ I drive the wheel madly as tho’ to o’ertake them,—
Give chase without wisdom, or wit, or avail.
The clock in the workshop,—it rests not a moment;
It points on, and ticks on: Eternity—Time;
And once someone told me the clock had a meaning,—
Its pointing and ticking had reason and rhyme.
And this too he told me,—or had I been dreaming,—
The clock wakened life in one, forces unseen,
And something besides;... I forget what; Oh, ask not!
I know not, I know not, I am a machine.
At times, when I listen, I hear the clock plainly;—
The reason of old—the old meaning—is gone! ”

“ You once loved the songs of my homeland, as I once loved and cherished the wild, impassioned songs of your sunny isles. Ambushed in your warm, impulsive clasp, I have heard the moaning waves wailing, breaking over the coral reefs, tossing their arms with laughter, like the dusky children of those wild shores. You have haunted me in long, long dreams through the night, as I slept by the banyans of the moonlit shore. Soft-footed you crept out of the shadows and sang your magical melodies into my sleeping ears. And Pauline would come too, the beloved maid of the Western Seas. ”

“ Every hour differs from the last. There is a time just between three o’clock and five when all the vibrations of the earth change. It seems the good-bye of the night and the awakening of the day. Day holds night in some subtle, lingering embrace that will not let go until the very gray of the dawn drives the reluctant darkness from the earth. ”

“ The hour was the turn of the night, the hour of maximum tension before dawn, the hour when all the world seems plunged in a profundity of slumber whence there can be no awakening, and when the completeness of the silence attunes the soul to special sensibility, and when the stars seem to be hanging strangely close to earth, and the morning star, in particular, to be shining as brightly as a miniature sun. ”

“ I instinctively gazed over the side and saw far off, opposite the weather-side of the moonlit sky-line, curling and tossing breakers, where liquid masses soared and dissolved on the coral reefs of an enchanted isle; for enchanted it looked to me as the tiny wind drifted us onward. Slowly the inland palm-clad mountain ranges rose, and the groves of coco-palms and dark-leafed tropical trees, and out of the creeks and bay came native canoes filled with paddling, singing savages! ”

“ Ian
The clocks! Bring them! [Seizes the spade over by the house; begins to dig a grave behind the sun-dial.] Bring every one! We will bury the clocks before the sun-dial—an offering, a living sacrifice. I tell you this is great, Eloise. What is a clock? Something agreed upon and arbitrarily imposed upon us. Standard time. Not true time. Symbolizing the whole standardization of our lives. Clocks! Why, it is clockiness that makes America mechanical and mean! Clock-minded! A clock is a little machine that shuts us out from the wonder of time. ”

“ The inland mountains rose till their distant peaks seemed to pierce the blue vault of heaven. Lines of plumed palms and picturesque bread-fruits stretched for miles and miles. On the slopes grew the ndrala-trees, covered with scarlet blossoms. Along the shores gleamed the blue lagoons, shining like mirrors as the swell from the calm sea broke into sheafs of iridescent foam by the coral reefs. It seemed incredible that only a few years before the death-drums of the cannibal tribes had echoed through that paradise of silent, tropical forest. ”

“ Yes, to be ashore on some far-away isle, clasping the savage maid in your arms by the coco-palms, gazing in the delicious orbs of the Universe—infinity in beams of eyelight. To breathe the present, yet be alive in the past, far away down the centuries of the modern dark ages! To walk by primeval forest and tumbling moonlit seas where they break over coral reefs. To rest by camp fires and huts, talking with bush women and men, and girls with sparkling eyes, eyes clear as heaven with her moon and stars. ”

“ The hour is one; through darkness steals the day; Shines in your hearts the morning star's first ray? The clock is two! who comes to meet the day, And to the Lord of days his homage pay? The clock is three! the Three in One above Let body, soul and spirit truly love. The clock is four! where'er on earth are three, The Lord has promised He the fourth will be. The clock is five! while five away were sent, Five other virgins to the marriage went! The clock is six, and from the watch I'm free, And every one may his own watchman be! ”

“ ORLANDO
You should ask me what time o' day; there's no clock in the forest.
ROSALIND
Then there is no true lover in the forest, else sighing every minute and groaning every hour would detect the lazy foot of time as well as a clock.
ORLANDO
And why not the swift foot of time? had not that been as proper?
ROSALIND
By no means, sir. Time travels in divers paces with divers persons. I'll tell you who time ambles withal, who time trots withal, who time gallops withal, and who he stands still withal. ”

“ While I am walking with Michael some one often comes to me to ask the time of day. Few of the people, however, are sufficiently used to modern time to understand in more than a vague way the convention of the hours, and when I tell them what o'clock it is by my watch they are not satisfied, and ask how long is left them before the twilight. ”

“ The eyes of the immense crowd are ever being turned towards the lighted clock-face of the "Auld and Faithfu" Tron, the hour approaches, the hands seem to stand still, but in one second more the hurrahing, the cheering, the hand-shaking, the health-drinking, the swaying to and fro of the immense throng, is all kept up as long as the clock continues to ring out the much-longed-for midnight hour. ”

“ The face of the clock. The hands, like black daggers, had pointed to ten minutes of one. Ten minutes of life! Ten minutes to live! Or—less?
Silence, broken only by the reluctant click-clack, click-clack of the rosewood clock. ”

“ For how could 'time' be measured in minutes or hours by a woman wearing a blindfold, shut away in the dark, and waiting a verdict that could cause the future to slough away into chill gulfs? And how could 'time' have any meaning when the stars faded out of the sky and a sunset gun boomed farewell to the joys of the physical world? ”

“ We awake, look at our watch, see “four o’clock”; it is only four o’clock in the morning, but we imagine that the whole day has gone by, so vividly does this nap of a few minutes, unsought by us, appear to have come down to us from the skies, by virtue of some divine right, full-bodied, vast, like an Emperor’s orb of gold. ”

“ Maybe God's clock in heaven already points, for you, at the last hour; maybe this is the last time that you will be warned, and then the clock will strike and you will be in eternity. Time and tide are rushing on. Every tick of the clock brings you nearer heaven or nearer hell. Oh! then prepare yourself for the great day, that so when time is dead and gone; when the great clock strikes for the last time, you may be found ready, and go in with Jesus to his marriage feast. ”

“ We can, however, remember that one more thing which the sun does for us is to tell us the time. God gave him "to rule the day ... and to divide the light from the darkness," and he marks how long our day is to be, "keeping time," as May's verse says, all the world over—for he is the great clock which tells the hours and the days—a clock which never needs to be wound up, and which we can trust, for it never goes wrong. ”

“ It was then after one o’clock—in those latitudes a time that is neither day nor night, nor morning, nor evening, but a ghostlike hour, in which all shapes, all things, the very sky and earth, are strange to human beings. ”

“ The waves steal over the coral reefs and murmur mysteriously by the lagoons of magic lands, dark with forest branches; midnight stars are reflected in the clear harbour waters as the blue vault of heaven over your head gleams with worlds that are twinkling and flashing and you dream you hear them singing, and see writ on the wonderful canvas of starry space the bright eternal words, expressing the tremendous loneliness of Infinity that swallows up human imagination, leaving us only wonder and hope. ”

“ Not less curious is the orrery clock, five hundred years old, which illustrates the astronomical ideas of its time in compelling the sun to make a circuit of the dial every day, while the moon occupies a month. ”

“ The great advantage, it is true, which clocks have over watches and other dumb reckoners of time is, that for the most part they strike the hour—that they are as it were the mouth-pieces of time; that they not only point it to the eye, but impress it on the ear; that they ‘lend it both an understanding and a tongue.’ Time thus speaks to us in an audible and warning voice. Objects of sight are easily distinguished by the sense, and suggest useful reflections to the mind; sounds, from their intermittent nature, and perhaps other causes, appeal more to the imagination, and strike upon the heart. ”

“ In ancient books the word cloche simply stands for a bell,—the monks being accustomed to ring a bell at certain periods marked for them by their sun-dials or hour-glasses, and 'What's o'clock?' in old writers is often merely equivalent to the inquiry, 'What hour was last struck by bell?' The word horologe or hour-measurer of course equally applied to the sun-dial, the clepsydra, and the clock, and this convertibility of terms makes it all the more difficult to trace the point at which the newer invention began. ”

“ But there is a clock surpassing all others. I call it God's clock. It is the Sun. Since time began God's clock has kept time. It is the central clock of our universe. It regulates all others. It does not have to be wound. God has seen to that. How can we help worshiping the God who has made such a clock!
MEMORY VERSE, Psalm 74: 16
"The day is thine, the night also is thine; thou hast prepared the light and the sun."
MEMORY HYMN [47]
"Sun of my soul, thou Saviour dear." ”

“ She at once rose and swiftly attired herself in the picturesque costume which Hawahee, with such artistic toil and love, had weaved. Stealing from her chamber, she ran outside her doorway and stood like a graceful nymph in the cool morning air. Her face was strangely flushed, her eyes feverish-looking, as she gazed into the shadowy depths of the orange trees and smelt the damp of the gloom that were illuminated with flowers. Glancing around, she spied the calabash wherein Hawahee kept the fermented orange and lime juice which he so carefully made for himself. ”

“ The revolutions of the sun and moon, the properest measures of time for mankind. The diurnal and annual revolutions of the sun, as having been, from the beginning of nature, constant, regular, and universally observable by all mankind, and supposed equal to one another, have been with reason made use of for the measure of duration. ”

“ It will be at the most unexpected moment, when you are most busy, and when you think you can be least spared. I can not exactly say whether it will be in the noon, or at the sundown when people are coming home, or in the morning when the world is waking up, or while the clock is striking twelve at night. ”

“ Angela hung her head and made no answer, and the clock above them boomed out the hour, raising its sullen note in insolent defiance of the silence. What is it that is so solemn about the striking of the belfry-clock when one stands in a churchyard at night? Is it that the hour softens our natures, and makes them more amenable to semi- superstitious influences? ”

“ Permit me to bring home to you, by means of a very modest example, what man may gain in force by being but a voice. Look at that clock. When the hour has come, it marks it. Whether it be the hour of birth or of death, the hour of joy or of sorrow, the hour of longed-for meetings, or of heart-breaking farewells, the clock strikes that hour. It is only a mechanism, but it is scrupulously exact, it measures that time which descends to us drop by drop from the bosom of eternity, and when the hammer falls on the brazen bell, the entire universe confirms what it announces. ”

“ And, on the other hand, if you set a clock forward even so little as ten minutes, you take away that much from the future, and you make the coming hour only fifty minutes long. Now, no human being has a right to take anything away from the future, or to make the hours shorter than they were intended to be. I desire, my dear niece, that you will earnestly think over what I have said, and I am sure that you will then see for yourself how unwise it would be to trifle with the length of the hours which make up our day. And now, Arla, let us talk of other things. ”