Hour

“ Seconds seemed hours; minutes seemed days; hours seemed infinite. Still I was perfectly conscious during the intermissions between the paroxysms. I would look at my watch, and then, after an hour or two, as I thought, would look again, and find that scarcely five minutes had elapsed. ”

“ 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! ”

“ Five o’clock! You make a violent exertion, and start up in bed. The vision is at once dispelled; the trunk-maker’s shop is your own bedroom, and the other apprentice your shivering servant, who has been vainly endeavouring to wake you for the last quarter of an hour, at the imminent risk of breaking either his own knuckles or the panels of the door. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Mark now how I piece out the time: three quarters of an hour to row ashore, half an hour to march to the house, that makes an hour and a quarter; an hour in executing our errand, that makes two hours and a quarter; and then another hour and a quarter to regain the schooner, that makes three hours and a half in all. Call the time four o'clock when we sail away, by five we shall be out of sight of land. ”

“ Now comes the noontide hour—of all the hours, nearest akin to midnight, for each has its own calmness and repose. Soon, however, the world begins to turn again upon its axis, and it seems the busiest epoch of the day, when an accident impedes the march of sublunary things. ”

“ Now, just as she wrote, the clock, which I was careful not to meddle with, had been rapidly gaining time, and I was standing before it, watching it from hour to hour, and slightly changing its rate by dropping small weights upon its pendulum. Time is so important an element with the astronomer, that all else is subordinate to it. ”

“ Between the dark and the daylight,
When the night is beginning to lower,
Comes a pause in the day's occupations,
That is known as the Children's Hour. ”

“ 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. ”

“ WINGED HOURS Each hour until we meet is as a bird
That wings from far his gradual way along
The rustling covert of my soul,—his song
Still loudlier trilled through leaves more deeply stirr'd:
But at the hour of meeting, a clear word
Is every note he sings, in Love's own tongue; ”

“ It tells the hours, half-hours and quarter-hours, and the bells which make the report of the flight of time, are struck by automaton figures. A youth strikes the quarter, a mature man the half-hour, and an old man, as the figure of Time, the full hour. ”

“ The day passed. To how many excited and impatient people it seemed to contain more than twenty-four hours! And each hour held far more than sixty minutes! There came no answer, no letter, no telegram! ”

“ Hour passes after hour, the noon succeeds to morning, and the evening to noon, while a thousand objects are forced upon his attention, which he rejects as fast as they are offered, but which the custom of the world requires to be received with appearance of regard. ”

“ The clock struck the solemn hour of one, that hour when fancy stalks outside reason, and malignant possibilities stand rock-firm as facts. ”

“ If you set back a clock, even as little as ten minutes, you add that much to the time that has passed. The hour which has just gone by has been made seventy minutes long. Now, no human being has the right to add anything to the past, nor to make hours longer than they were originally [73] made. ”

“ Is not a day divided into twenty-four hours, each hour into sixty minutes, and every minute sub-divided into sixty seconds? Now in 86,400 seconds very many things can be done.” ”

“ The thridde hour inequal. 'In the astrological system, the day, from sunrise to sunset, and the night, from sunset to sunrise, being each divided into twelve hours, it is plain that the hours of the day and night were never equal except just at the equinoxes. The hours attributed to the planets were of this unequal sort. See Kalendrier de Berg. loc. cit., and our author's treatise on the Astrolabe.'—Tyrwhitt. ”

“ The hour and minute hands are home together, ready to start out and go around again. They are always ready to go and they always go the right way. They never go the wrong way. The minute hand goes all the way around, counts all the minutes and gets back home while the hour hand goes to only one figure, and then we know it is one o’clock, because the hour hand is pointing to it. ”

“ I can get an hour—possibly two—on Tuesday, two hours on Thursday, one on Friday, two on Saturday, and one or two on Sunday—nine hours a week under favourable circumstances, and never a moment more. But writing being to me the purest pleasure and refreshment, I never lose a minute in getting to work, and I use every moment of the time. ”

“ When we say “6 o'clock” we mean a point of time marked by the striking of the clock. We have no names for the hour periods. We must say “from 5 to 6” or “between 5 and 6” for an hour period. The “twelfth hour” of the New Testament, I understand to mean a whole hour ending at sunset; so we are dealing with an oriental attitude of mind towards time. I think we get that conception nearly correct when we read of the “middle watch” and understand it to mean during the middle third of the night. Secondly, why do the Japanese use no 1, 2, 3 on their dials? ”

“ But why, the inquisitive may ask—the child-man who is for ever cutting up the bellows to discover the reservoir of the wind—why four o’clock a.m.? Why not begin our pilgrimage at one a.m., and finish the first half at midnight, in the orthodox get-up-and-go-to-bed manner? [11] Simply because four a.m. is in reality the first hour of the working London day. The giant is wide awake at midnight; he sinks into a fitful slumber about two in the morning: short is his rest, for at four he is up again and at work, the busiest bee in the world’s hive. ”

“ At one-thirty o'clock."
"That's the exact luncheon hour, as it happens, but I notice that many of the best fiancés make it a practice to report for duty at least half an hour before the gong. It looks so much better."
"Running and eating's no better than eating and running, you allege. There's some small merit in the contention.... What of those sterling fiancés who punch the time-clock a full hour before the whistle?"
"Oh, dear me, Hugo, are there any like that?" ”

“ For if we suppose the time marked to be an hour, the space passed over by the minute hand, that is, the circumference of the dial, has no relation with the hour except what the artificer gave it by so constructing the watch that the minute hand would make one revolution every hour. ”

“ 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 ”

“ Now, the exact time of the day at the place where we are, can be ascertained by well known and easy observations of the Sun if visible for a few minutes at any time from his being ten degrees high until within an hour of noon, or from an hour after noon until he is only 10 degrees high in the afternoon; if therefore, at any time when such observation is made, a Timekeeper tells us at the same moment what o'clock it is at the place we sailed from, our Longitude is clearly discovered. ”

“ I wasted time, and now doth time waste me;
For now hath time made me his numb’ring clock.
My thoughts are minutes, and with sighs they jar
Their watches on unto mine eyes, the outward watch,
Whereto my finger, like a dial’s point,
Is pointing still, in cleansing them from tears.
Now, sir, the sound that tells what hour it is
Are clamorous groans which strike upon my heart,
Which is the bell. So sighs and tears and groans
Show minutes, times, and hours. ”

“ LESSON XXVIII.
THE CLOCK AND THE SUNDIAL. A FABLE. 1. One gloomy day, the clock on a church steeple, looking down on a sundial, said,
THIRD READER. 73 "How stupid it is in you to stand there all the while like a stock! 2. "You never tell the hour till a bright sun looks forth from the sky, and gives you leave. I go merrily round, day and night, in summer and winter the same, without asking his leave. 3. "I tell the people the time to rise, to go to dinner, and to come to church. ”

“ They count not the hours of the day as we do, from twelve to twelve; but they begin their count from Sun-set, and the first hour after sun-set is one a clok; and so they count on till four and twenty, that is till the next Sun-set again. ”

“ In every undertaking of any importance the most favourable hour could be selected long before by the [Pg 68] person chiefly concerned, the hour in which his star would be in the best quarter of the sky and in the most propitious relations with its neighbours. ”

“ Here was a tranquil, sunshiny day of a life that was to be agitated and stormy—a happy hour or two to remember. Not much happened during the happy hour or two. It was only sweet sleep, pleasant waking, friendly welcome, serene pastime. ”

“ This 'hour of the planet' is a mere astrological supposition, involving no point of astronomy. Each hour is an 'hour inequal,' or the 12th part of the artificial day or night. The assumptions are so made that first hour of every day may resemble the name of the day; the first hour of Sunday is the hour of the Sun, and so on. ”

“ The difference between rising at five and seven o'clock in the morning, for the space of forty years, supposing a man to go to bed at the same hour at night, is nearly equivalent to the addition of ten years to a man's life.—Doddridge. ”

“ After luncheon the sun, conscious that it was Saturday, would blaze an hour longer in the zenith, and when some one, thinking that we were late in starting for our walk, said, "What, only two o'clock!" ”

“ One night—it was in June, ’89—there came a ring to my bell, about the hour when a man gives his first yawn and glances at the clock. ”

“ They know the time to go!
The fairy clocks strike their inaudible hour
In field and woodland, and each punctual flower
Bows at the signal an obedient head
And hastes to bed. ”

“ 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. ”

“ All the exquisite influences of the hour trembled in their veins, and drew them to each other as the loosened leaves were drawn to the earth. ”

“ I am aware that you have nominally an hour (often in reality an hour and a half) in the midst of the day, less than half of which time is given to eating. But I will leave you all that to spend as you choose. You may read your newspapers then. ”

“ Now as the beginning of each year varies, one commencing at the sixth hour of the day, another at the same hour of the night, to prevent the calculation from throwing all science into confusion by its perplexing diversity, and the months of autumn from sometimes being found to come in the spring, it has been settled that those six hours which in a period of four years amount to twenty-four shall be put together so as to make one day and night. ”

“ As I have previously said, the chief beauty about the constant supply of time is that you cannot waste it in advance. The next year, the next day, the next hour are lying ready for you, as perfect, as unspoilt, as if you had never wasted or misapplied a single moment in all your career. ”

“ The city time measurers are so far behind each other that the last chime of eight has hardly fallen on the ear from the last church, when another sprightly clock is heard to begin the hour of nine. Each clock, however, governs, and is believed in by, its own immediate neighbourhood. ”

“ So runs the round of life from hour to hour. ”

“ I believe the twenty-four hour day has come to stay—anomalous though it certainly will seem in the ten-day week, the fifty-day month, and the thousand-day year. ”