Light-year

“ Of all the periods marked out by the motions of the celestial bodies, the most conspicuous, and the most intimately connected with the affairs of mankind, are the solar day, which is distinguished by the diurnal revolution of the earth and the alternation of light and darkness, and the solar year, which completes the circle of the seasons. ”

“ How wonderful is the increase and decrease of the moon; sometimes it seems to be shut up in darkness, and again, in its season, to emerge by degrees into a fulness of light. And these varieties God hath appointed for a regular distinction of the times and seasons of the year, and of the affairs and business of mankind. ”

“ Nothing varies the monotony of the long days and nights composing the lunar year, save the changing positions of the intensely black shadows falling from hills and mountains that cut off or fling back into space the white light of the sun ”

“ Similarly, to all nations which use the tropical year, whether their calendar is dependent on the sun alone, or on both sun and moon, there are two natural epochs at which the year may begin; at the spring equinox, the beginning of the bright half of the year, when the sun is high in the heavens, and all nature is reviving under its heat and light; and at the autumn equinox, the beginning of the dark half of the year, when the sun is low in the heavens, and all nature seems dying. ”

“ If sidereal time be exact and invariable, while solar time is inexact and variable, every prejudice of habit will have to be discarded, and we must accustom ourselves to having New Year’s Day fall sometimes in the height of summer sometimes in the depth of winter, just as we have accustomed ourselves to have, say four o'clock fall at one season in light and heat, at another season in darkness and cold. ”

“ Three thousand years probably, passed away in the performance of these three days' work. In the fourth day the Lord permitted the sun and moon to shine to give light to the earth. What regulated the evening and the morning the first three days we do not know, for neither sun nor moon were permitted to shine until the fourth day. I have no doubt, the Lord has a variety of methods of producing light? The new translation gives us some information on this subject, for there we read that, "I the Lord created darkness on the face of the "great deep." ”

“ No one who has waited till day's decline to make the return journey at any period of the year will have reason 146 to regret it, though in the winter months the effects of light and shadow are, of course, far more transient—far too much so—than during the spring, summer, and even early autumn. ”

“ Our hopes, like snow-flakes, now are falling fast,
Our dreams are broken—God have mercy on us!—
We must not perish in the wintry blast—
For see, O see!—the sun,—the sun is shining!
'Tis noon, and lo!—yon glorious orb of day
Is turning backward, a New-year designing—
So shall all Winters turn to Spring alway.
And so shall Winter be an emblem only
Of the dark days that meet us, one and all,
Making our little lives seem sad and lonely,
Until the New-Year answers to our call,
Until another Spring renewing Nature ”

“ Rapid, rosy-tinted lightnings, where the rocky clouds are riven,
Like the lifting of a veil before the inner courts of heaven;
Silver stars in azure evenings, slowly climbing up the steep;
Cornfields ripening to the harvest, and the wide seas smooth with sleep.
Circled with those living splendours, Summer passed from out my sight;
Like a dream that filled with beauty all the caverns of the night!
And the vision and the presence into empty nothing ran—
And the New Year was still older, and seemed now a youthful man.
III.
Autumn! ”

“ Shall see the Kings full glory break,
Nor from the blissful vision shrink:
In fearless love and hope uncloyed
For ever on that ocean bright
Empowered to gaze; and undestroyed,
Deeper and deeper plunge in light.
Though scarcely now their laggard glance
Reach to an arrow’s flight, that day
They shall behold, and not in trance,
The region “very far away.”
If Memory sometimes at our spell
Refuse to speak, or speak amiss,
We shall not need her where we dwell
Ever in sight of all our bliss. ”

“ But, as observations accumulate and become more accurate, it is found that the sun, and not the moon, regulates the seasons, and that the year repeats on a larger scale the phenomenon presented by the day and night, of a birth, growth, maturity, decay, and death of the sun, followed by a resurrection or new birth, when the same cycle begins anew. ”

“ 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. ”

“ It is now useless to speculate as to how many cycles of almost infinite years had begun and ended, before Earth’s fading fires gave notice that they must soon expire in night.
The stages through which the Earth passed in turn await the sun, save that there is no further beneficent luminary to give him light and heat: when time shall have quenched his fiery glow, death and night shall reign supreme, where now is life and light. ”

“ At the summer solstice, the sun became a strong man, heavily bearded, who, in the prime of maturity, symbolized the fact that Nature at this period of the year is strongest and most fecund. At the autumnal equinox, the sun was pictured as an aged man, shuffling along with bended back and whitened locks into the oblivion of winter darkness. ”

“ To us a thorn, to her a rose;
The year so black, the year so white,
Like rivers twain their course have run;
The earthly stream we trace and know,
But who shall paint the heavenly one?
A year! We gather up our powers,
Our lamps we consecrate and trim ”

“ If I were to choose a time most suitable for interesting a novice in the beauties and wonders of uranography, I would select the winter, and I would lead my acolyte, on a clear, frosty night, when the landscape was glittering with crusted snow, upon some eminence where the curve of the horizon was broken only by the leafless tops of a few trees, through which the rising stars would flash like electric lamps. ”

“ At no other season do the heavenly bodies seem so intimately associated with the earth as in summer. All nature is now attuned, and the stars glow softly in the tepid atmosphere, stirred by faint breezes, like veritable flowers of the sky. The firmament becomes a vast garden lit with beautiful lamps, which seem to have been placed there to dimly illuminate nocturnal wanderers in the transparent gloom beneath. Their beauty is as refreshing as the cooling breath of night itself. A mystic influence steals from them over the earth. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The sky, grey in autumn, snowy in winter, and golden in spring, corresponds to the grey sky of evening, the silver one of night, and the golden one of morning. Spring is the dawn of the year; the primitive myth is but amplified; the last hour of the day awakens the aurora; the last month of the solar year awakens the spring. The application of the myth of the day to the year is one of the greatest simplicity. ”

“ Within a few hours Time has reversed its hour-glass, and now the sands of a new year are trickling down.—Uranus strikes for our little earth the centuries, the sun strikes the years, the moon the months; and on this concert clock, constructed out of worlds, human beings come forth as images, that utter cries and tones of joy, when it strikes. ”

“ All round the year the changing suns and rains
Beat on men’s work—to wreck and to decay—
But nature builds more perfectly than they,
Her changing unchanged sea resists, remains.
All round the year new flowers spring up to shew
How gloriously life is more strong than death;
And in our hearts are seeds of love and faith,
Ah, sun and showers, be kind, and let them grow.
RESURGAM. Swift pass the hours, or lengthened by our hearts
Uncertain measurement of time,
And when we dream the year has just awoke,
We wake to find her in her prime. ”

“ The dying Earth lay wrapped in its dismal coat of what was soon to be the complete darkness of a sunless world. Just as she no longer had the Moon, her Lamp of Ages, to light the night skies as she whirled on her course through the limitless ocean of Space, so now she was about to lose the Sun which, after billions of years, was at last burning out. Cold somber darkness of everlasting night was to engulf the eight planets to which old Sol had once given heat and light. ”

“ The days and nights swing equally upon the golden balance of time. The year is whitening with its crop of frost-blossoms from which no harvest-home has ever yet [19] been called. Like an unwritten page, the new year lies before us in untrodden fields of shining snow. God grant the footsteps of Death be not the first to track the unbroken path that lies before us. May joy and peace and love, like the roots of the violets under the snow, quicken and blossom for all of us as the year advances, and may our progress be, like January's, right steadily onward unto June! ”

“ The new year shall yet be summer;
The night shall be followed by day;
And the soul that shall live forever
From the earth shall speed away.
The earth is the night and the winter,
And heaven is summer and day ”

“ Indeed, if one comes to think of it, how much even now do any of us, save the most scientific, mean by the year, beyond the visible change of summer and winter? What we are thinking of is the leafless trees, the ice and snow, the green grass in spring, the flowers and warm days in summer, not the abstract astronomical fact of the earth's revolution round the sun, or the due succession of the signs of the zodiac. It is that visible organic year that must have counted most with man from the first ”

“ One part of the earliest astronomy, which was so sound as to have held its own ever since, was the measurement of time by the sun, moon, and stars. The day and the month fix themselves at once. In a less exact way the seasons of the year, such as the rainy season, or the icy season, or the growing season, furnish a means of reckoning, as where a savage tells of his father’s death having been three rains or three winters ago. Rude tribes, who observe the stars to find their way by, notice also that the rising and setting of particular stars or constellations mark the seasons. ”

“ This marvellous renewal of the life of the land after the long cold winter makes the budding and nesting spring-time the most joyous portion of the year, and one which exerts a marked effect on human thought and activities. The 294 spring-time awakening in all nature is like a resurrection, and has apparently exerted an influence on the religions of the world. ”

“ Such a day, in this sad season of the year, when the glory of the woods is rapidly departing, and from the swollen streams and dewy pastures the vapours ascend in a dense whirl of clouds, is of frequent occurrence; and on such a day, the solar sphere, as it struggles through the screening mists, seems like the face of the moon at its full, when slightly veiled. ”

“ The poor old year died hard; for all the earth lay cold
And bare beneath the wintry sky;
While grey clouds scurried madly to the west,
And hid the chill young moon from mortal sight.
Deep, dying groans the aged year breathed forth,
In soughing winds that wailed a requiem sad
In dull crescendo through the mournful air. ”

“ When the season of winter has had its effect, again the spiritual springtime returns, and a new cycle appears. Spiritual breezes blow, the luminous dawn gleams, the divine clouds give rain, the rays of the Sun of Reality shine forth, the contingent world attains unto a new life and is clad in a wonderful garment. All the signs and the gifts of the past springtime reappear, with perhaps even greater splendor in this new season.
The spiritual cycles of the Sun of Reality are like the cycles of the material sun: they are always revolving and being renewed. ”

“ But men have tried to connect them from the most remote ages, and have devised the lunar-solar year, the duration of which is related to the movements of the sun and the moon. Although this system may appear complicated, it is in reality quite simple, for the sun and moon spare man the trouble of calculating the days, while the years and months write themselves in large characters in the appearance of the sky and of vegetation. ”

“ Twilight and dawn would always be as they are now. But the most curious thing of all would be the absence of the different seasons of the year. Now there were Summer, Winter, Fall, and Spring. The people living on Jupiter did not know these seasons at all. ”

“ Year by year in his own beautiful land he beheld, with natural regret, the bright pomp of summer fading into the gloom and stagnation of winter, and year by year he hailed with natural delight the outburst of fresh life in spring. ”

“ Were we from the darkness of night at once exposed to the luminous rays of the Sun, it would dazzle our eyes and render them unfit to distinguish a single object.—It is only by a gradual transition from darkness to light that we are able to accustom our eyes to the brilliancy of noon. ”

“ Before, then, the yearly apparent movements of the sun had been fully made out, observations of a star rising or setting with the sun at some critical time of the agricultural cycle, say sowing-time or harvest, would be of the highest 61 importance, and would secure the work being done at the right time of the—to the early peoples—still unformulated year. ”