Day (time)

“ One day is so like another that it passes unmarkedly by, and one finds oneself, all at once, at the end of the week, and is brought to final consciousness of the rapid rotation of time’s wheels at the end of the month. ”

“ Indeed, as primitive man saw nature, day was the only division of time upon which he could absolutely rely. The waxing and waning of the moon, with its everchanging shape and occasional obscuration by clouds, as well as its periodic disappearances from the heavens all combined to render that luminary of little account in measuring the passage of time. ”

“ No wonder the god of day, that rises so bright and cheery of mornings, sets at eve blushing rosy red at the enormities he beholds; no wonder Nature at even-time rains down her dewy tears, and dons the mourning garb of night, sending the indulgent moon to shade away monstrosities or else to gild and beautify. ”

“ For what is Time? The shadow on the dial,--the striking of the clock,--the running of the sand,--day and night,--summerand winter,--months, years, centuries! These are but arbitrary and outward signs,--the measure of Time, not Time itself! Time is the Life of the Soul. ”

“ Thus it appears that the same identical part of time, which composes our days, compose their nights, and while we are keeping Sunday, they are in their midnight dreams; nor is it possible in nature, that the same identical part of time, which makes the first day of the week with us, should make the first day of the week with the inhabitants on the opposite side of the globe. ”

“ Though every day be a New Year's Day, still the alteration in our dates and our calendars should set us all thinking of that continual lapse of the mysterious thing—the creature of our own minds—which we call time, and which is bearing us all so steadily and silently onwards. ”

“ There was no pause, no pity, no peace, no interval of relenting rest, no measurement of time. Though days and nights circled as regularly as when time was young, and the evening and morning were the first day, other count of time there was none. ”

“ It is the time of day, too, when the spirits are freshest and highest, animated by the prospect of the work, the difficulties, the pleasures, or the adventures of the day that has begun; and cheered by that cool, clear buoyancy of Nature which belongs exclusively to the happy morning hours, and has led poets in all ages to compare these hours to the first sweet months of spring or the early years of childhood. ”

“ Day is daily swallowed up by Night, to be set free again at dawn, and from time to time suffers a like but shorter durance in the maw of the Eclipse and the Storm-cloud; 335Summer is overcome and prisoned by dark Winter, to be again set free. ”

“ And so the length of the day makes not the Sun to shine long, neither the shortness of the day causes not [sic] the Sun to shine the lesser time, but contrariwise the long shining of the Sun makes the long day, and the short shining of the Sun makes the lesser day: else answer me what makes the days long or short? ”

“ The time, termed by the prophet, the great and the terrible day, is usually in scripture stiled the day of the Lord. The space from the creation of man upon the earth to the end of all things, is the day of the sons of men: the time that is now passing over us, is properly our day. ”

“ The day is not equal to the night in this country; that is, the sun appears for more than twelve hours above the horizon, and, consequently, a less time than twelve hours elapses before it shines again to us in the morning. Besides, the fallacy of this common saying is perceived at once by any one who considers, that the inhabitant of the north pole, if there is any inhabitant there, has already seen for some days the sun above his horizon, and it will not set to him for above six months. The day then is not equal to the night, either in the united kingdom, or at the north pole. ”

“ One day melts and blends into the other so that you can hardly tell them apart. They stretch along into weeks, and the weeks, perhaps, into months which can neither be called long nor short, but only just a monotonous reach of time. ”

“ The length of the day is equal to our lunar month, for all that time is included in one revolution round her axis. Her days and nights, therefore, will constantly be of the same length, or almost fifteen of our days each. ”

“ Time takes its first Denomination from the diurnal Rotation of the Earth upon its Axis, which we call a natural Day, and this for obvious Reasons we subdivide in twenty-four Parts or Hours. This diurnal Motion having been successively repeated, and the Day renewed three hundred and sixty-five Times, we find that all the vegetable World has gone through all its Variegations, and Nature has again put on the same Face, adapted to the Season; during which Time, and indeed which occasions this general Change and Repetition, the Earth is found to make one intire Revolution round the Sun. ”

“ In any weather, at any hour of the day or night, I have been anxious to improve the nick of time, and notch it on my stick too; to stand on the meeting of two eternities, the past and future, which is precisely the present moment; to toe that line. ”

“ A day is lapsing. I hear cockerels crowing in the yard, and see them stalking among the chips in the sun. I hear busy feet on the floors, and the whole house jars with industry. Surely the day is well spent, and the time is full to overflowing. Mankind is as busy as the flowers in summer, which make haste to unfold themselves in the forenoon, and close their petals in the afternoon. ”

“ Within the day two phenomena chiefly recur with such unfailing constancy as to be of use in counting: they are the daily reviving sun and the night or sleeping-time. The word for sun is often the same as that for day. Within the day fall a number of occupations which chiefly turn the attention to its length and varying phenomena, and this is the case also with the sun itself, for the varying position of the sun in the heavens affords the most usual mode of indicating the time of day. ”

“ A day of years, and a night of years, are each 360 years along; for as a day in symbolic time represents a year, or 360 days; so if the decorum of the symbol require it, each of these days may represent a year. ”

“ Our task is now to make clear the nature of these discontinuous and pars pro toto time-indications, since from them proceeds, as order is ever evolved out of chaos, the continuous time-reckoning, the calendar.
[11]
CHAPTER I.
THE DAY. For primitive man the day is the simplest and most obvious unit of time. The variations of day and night, light and darkness, sleeping and waking penetrate at least as deeply into life as the changes following upon the course of the year, such as heat and cold, drought and rainy seasons, periods of famine and plenty. ”

“ Days are also thought to be concrete and governed by their planets, and from this idea come all the superstitions about lucky and unlucky days. If a day had been from the beginning realised as a simple division of time no such superstitions could exist. ”

“ In looking back at the incidents of the day, which the language of custom has, with reference to our repasts, denominated THE MORNING, I could not avoid feeling the strong analogy which exists between such an excursion as that which I have here described and THE LIFE of MAN. Like that, and all things measured by TIME and SPACE, it had had its BEGINNING—its eventful COURSE—and its END determined by physical causes. ”

“ On page 337 of the present work, there is the spring dress of our ancestors in the fourteenth century, from an illumination [819, 820] in a manuscript copied by Strutt. From the same illumination, their summer dress in that age is here represented.
LONGEST DAY.
No day is disadvantageous to an agreeable thought or two upon “Time;” and the present, being the longest day, is selected for submitting to perusal a very pleasant little apologue from a miscellany addressed to the young. ”

“ Day, dā, n. the time of light, from sunrise to sunset: the time from morning till night: twenty-four hours, the time the earth takes to make a revolution on her axis—this being the solar or natural day as distinguished from the sidereal day, between two transits of the same star: a man's period of existence or influence: a time or period.—ns. Day′-bed (Shak.) , a couch or sofa; Day′-blind′ness, a defect of vision, in which objects are best seen by a dim light; Day′-book, a book in which merchants, &c., enter the transactions of every day; Day′break; Day′-coal, the upper stratum of coal ”

“ What do we know of time, except as calculated by earthly objects? Day and night, the recurrence of meals,—these constitute time to us: shut up a man in darkness, and administer his food at irregular intervals, and he loses all count of time whatever. ”

“ They are only arbitrary and meaningless divisions of time, which we have found necessary because we have a very meagre heavenly clockwork; but here they have a very elaborate one. Our day is a rational period based on the Sun's revolution. Here they have seen fit to give up the Sun-day to simplify matters and stick to a Moon-day. ”

“ As yesterday and the historical ages are past, as the work of to-day is present, so some flitting perspectives, and demi-experiences of the life that is in nature are in time veritably future, or rather outside to time, perennial, young, divine, in the wind and rain which never die. ”

“ We may, indeed, say that the hour of death is uncertain, but when we say so we represent that hour to ourselves as situated in a vague and remote expanse of time, it never occurs to us that it can have any connexion with the day that has already dawned, or may signify that death—or its first assault and partial possession of us, after which it will never leave hold of us again—may occur this very afternoon, so far from uncertain, this afternoon every hour of which has already been allotted to some occupation. You make a point of taking your drive every day so that in a month’s time you will have had the full benefit of the fresh air; ”

“ It is the natural standard too of our division of time into shorter intervals such as hours, minutes, and seconds. By the word day we mean of course the interval during which the earth makes a complete revolution round itself, while daytime may be used to express the portion of it during which our portion of the earth is towards the sun. The Greeks to avoid ambiguity used the word nyctemere, meaning night and day. ”

“ PERIODICITY We recognize and accept this cyclic return of time in such familiar manifestations of it as Nature affords in periodicity. We recognize it also in our mental and emotional life, when the periods can be co-ordinated with known physical phenomena, as in the case of the wanderlust which comes in the mild melancholy of autumn, the moods that go with waning day, and winter night. ”

“ Our mechanical arbitrary division of time is indeed a very false one. See how one day drags along, and how quickly another passes. The true measure of time is that which makes each man's life a day, his day. The real night is that in which no man can work. [193] Indeed, nothing can be more true and natural than those Eastern expressions. I remember things that happened in my childhood as one remembers what one did this morning. ”

“ Because you cannot regulate the day and night to have what the Saviour calls twelve hours in a day, without establishing the time from the centre of the earth, the equator, where, at the beginning of the sacred year, the sun rises and sets at 6 o'clock. ”

“ As a measure of intellectual capacity, it is claimed for them that they divide time into days, lunar months, seasons, and years; that they estimate accurately by the sun or stars the time of day or night ”

“ The unit of time is the mean solar-day, the time between the noons of two successive days, noon being taken as the moment of the passage of the sun over the local meridian, corrected by the equation of time or daily correction required to reduce the varying solar days to a mean of all the solar days. ”

“ But, says one, I should like to keep the Sabbath in time, just as Jesus did. Then you must live in Palestine, where their day begins seven hours earlier than ours; and yet it is at 6 o'clock in the evening the same period, though not the same by the sun, in which we begin our day. Let me illustrate: our earth, something in the form of an orange, is whirling over every twenty-four hours. ”

“ A moon nearly full, afterwards quite full, and then for a day or two still nearly full, rising night after night at nearly the same time, remaining also night after night longer above the horizon, manifestly serves man for the time being in the most convenient way possible. ”

“ Days are distinguished as solar, sidereal or lunar, according as the revolution is taken relatively to the sun, the stars or the moon. The solar day is the fundamental unit of time, not only in daily life but in astronomical practice. ”

“ It is known at what hour of the night, in different seasons, the southern cross is erect, or inclined. It is a timepiece that advances very regularly nearly four minutes a day; and no other group of stars exhibits, to the naked eye, an observation of time so easily made. ”

“ In the world there are times because the sun of the world seemingly advances in succession from one degree to another, producing times that are called seasons of the year; and besides, it revolves about the earth, producing times that are called times of day ”

“ The calendar and practical life become to some degree separated from each other; the first lays the principal emphasis upon the correct ordering of the series of days, which is of especial importance on religious grounds for the selection of days and the fixing of the right day for the religious observances; in practical life, however, the point of chief importance is to determine the times when the various occupations may be begun and sea-voyages undertaken, both of which depend upon the solar year, and for this the stars afford the best aid. ”