Menses

“ Youth, Day, Old Age and Night Youth, large, lusty, loving—youth full of grace, force, fascination, Do you know that Old Age may come after you with equal grace, force, fascination? Day full-blown and splendid-day of the immense sun, action, ambition, laughter, The Night follows close with millions of suns, and sleep and restoring darkness. ”

“ The cycles of Time roll with the procession of seasons. Spring is bloom; summer is growth; autumn is fruition; winter is the shroud, and beneath its cold, yet kindly fold, live the germs of a new life. ”

“ The days and months and years of a life race with accelerating pace and youth goes and age comes as the days race, but one is not older for the white days. The clock stops, the blood runs faster, furrows in gray matter smooth out, time forgets to put in tiny crow's-feet and the extra gray hair a week, or to withdraw by the hundredth of an ounce the oxygen from the veins; one grows no older for the days spent out of doors. ”

“ The day has been considered as an image of the year, and the year as the representation of life. The morning answers to the spring, and the spring to childhood and youth; the noon corresponds to the summer, and the summer to the strength of manhood. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Spring was the young child just born, full of smiles, of tears, and winsome ways—the beginnings of life. Summer was early maturity, in which the first promises of fruitage were beginning to be fulfilled. ”

“ The confusion of the twenty-eight-day month, or season, with the later introduced year of more than three hundred and fifty days is responsible for the traditions of such long human lives. There are records of a man who lived over nine hundred "years." ”

“ The best features of the year were spread in profusion, and with the clear blue sky, with peaceful clouds floating leisurely across it, combined to make a most fitting background for the ending of long weeks of anxiety and pain and the beginning of a lifetime, let us hope, of unalloyed pleasure. ”

“ Think of the difference in conditions! Life must fit itself to a day as long as fourteen earthly days, a cloudless sun-blaze of fourteen days, and then a night of equal length, growing ever colder and colder under these cold, sharp stars. ”

“ What are the moments loaded with passion, intense, and never-dying—years, ages upon earth! Away with the divisions of time, whilst one short breath—the smallest particle or measure of duration, shall outweigh ages. ”

“ The bulk of mankind, indeed, measure their year by the return of the sun, which is only one star. But when all the stars shall have returned to the place whence they set out, and after long periods shall again exhibit the same aspect of the whole heavens, that is what ought properly to be called the revolution of a year, though I scarcely dare attempt to enumerate the vast multitude of ages contained in it. ”

“ Periods of time separate us, but death levels us. The period which lies between our first day and our last is shifting and uncertain: if you reckon it by its troubles, it is long even to a lad, if by its speed, it is scanty even to a greybeard. Everything is slippery, treacherous, and more shifting than any weather. ”

“ Do not many among you, with an affectation of sometimes worshipping the heavenly bodies, likewise, move your lips in the direction of the sunrise? It is you, at all events, who have even admitted the sun into the calendar of the week; and you have selected its day, in preference to the preceding day, as the most suitable in the week, for either an entire abstinence from the bath, or for its postponement until the evening, or for taking rest, and for banqueting. ”

“ As we grow older the years seem to run to months, the months to weeks, the weeks to days, the days to hours, the hours to moments, until time, like an exhalation, appears to dissolve in the inane, and become the nothing it was and is and will be for eternity. ”

“ One day is with the Lord as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day.' How long will that day be of which a thousand years are but as the morning twilight? Brethren, you have need of patience. ”

“ Do you imagine that the years stop short with spring, and that one is always in the season of expectancy? No, no; months roll along, and after summer comes autumn, and then winter, and the light dress you fancied that you never need change would make but scanty clothing. ”

“ 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. ”

“ God’s periods may be periods expressed algebraically by letters symbolical of unknown quantity, and man’s periods by letters symbolical of quantities well known; but if God’s Sabbath be equal to one of his six working days, and man’s Sabbath equal to one of his six working days, the integrity of proportion is maintained. When I see the palpable absurdity of such a reading of the reason as the one given above, I can see no absurdity whatever in the reading which I subjoin:—“Six periods (a=a=a=a=a=a) shalt thou labor, &c., but on the seventh period (b=a) shalt thou do no labor, &c. ”

“ 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. ”

“ It divides itself very naturally into four periods—of about equal length—twenty to twenty-four years: the period of youth, the period of the prime of life, the period of middle age, and the period of old age. ”

“ Year builds on year with unvarying steadfastness the divine temple of their beauty and their sacrifice. They create, like God. The universe which science sees, studies, and explains, is small, is petty, beside the one which grows under their spiritual touch ”

“ The perpetual change of seasons, varying the aspect of the outside world every month, every week—nay, almost every day, is a continual interest to observant minds, and especially so to intelligent children, who are as yet lying on the breast of Mother Nature only, nor have begun to feel or understand the darker and sadder interests of human passion and emotion. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The single century divides itself, without the slightest violence offered, into four parts, which, if I had that capacity or partiality for flowery writing, the absence of which in me some critics have deplored, I might almost call Spring, Summer, Autumn, and Winter. ”

“ 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. ”

“ All of the cycles of the year are in the aspect of the cycle of night and day, evening and morning, which is the aspect of the darkness of the exile, which is similar to night; and the light of redemption, which is the aspect of morning, the aspect of the world in general, which is called 'night' in relation to the renewal of the world, which is the aspect of the World to Come. ”

“ It only means a month out of your life, a month’s trouble and discomfort, but with no risk. What is a month out of a lifetime, when that month means immortality to you and life to thousands? In a month you would make a half dozen after-dinner speeches and cause your friends to laugh and applaud. ”

“ When that period of the year returns at which any great event in our lives has occurred we have the feeling that the earth, in its annual round, has, in a manner, brought us back to the scene of that event. ”

“ Between the several ages of man, and the seasons, there is an obvious resemblance, which has furnished similes from time immemorial, but there is no propriety in peopling a spring scene with children, and a winter scene with the old, since all ages figure together in the world, and manifest the feelings which belong to their years, whether it happens to be winter or spring. ”

“ 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. ”

“ And they give light to each other in their times and in their seasons, in their minutes, in their hours, in their days, in their weeks, in their months, in their years: all these are one year with God, but not with man. ”

“ Most rightly it has been thought that the beginning of the year should be observed on the day that the Almighty Creator placed the sun, and the moon, and the stars, and the beginning of all the seasons ”

“ There is good reason why animals should have the periods of gestation, generation, and duration of life in certain cycles—I mean by cycle, a day, night, month, and year, and{524} the time which is described by these; also the motions of the moon—for these are the common origin of generation to all. ”

“ Winter and summer are not the only natural periodic cycles; there is the cycle of day and night, and yet among primitive peoples but little ritual centres round day and night. The reason is simple. The cycle of day and night is so short, it recurs so frequently, that man naturally counted upon it and had no cause to be anxious. The emotional tension necessary to ritual was absent. ”

“ This annual interval given to repose, travel, rural quiet or seaside amusement, to family and friendly intercourse, reading, and as much sleep as comes naturally, does certainly recruit the forces of body and mind considerably. During the working months, the wear and tear must be prodigious. ”

“ Even our own bodily life, with its recurrent heart-beats and breathings, is essentially periodic.8 The presupposition of periodicity is indeed fundamental to our very conception of life, and but for periodicity the very means of measuring time as a quantity would be absent. ”

“ For if the operations of the husbandman during spring have to be selected and curtailed with the strictest attention to time and the seasons, how carefully ought the energies and the time of youth to be economized, when they have but one short spring time afforded them, during which they are to sow the seed which shall produce good or evil fruit for eternity? ”

“ Note, Those that make an idol of the world, by taking it for their portion, will themselves perish with it. A month shall devour them, or eat them up—a certain time prefixed, and a short time. When God's judgments begin with them they shall soon make an end; one month will do their business. How much may a body be weakened by one month's sickness, or a kingdom wasted by one month's war! ”

“ We measure time by cycle ages, and the gate to every age we deem a mile stone in the journey of the race.
13. An age has passed; the gate unto another age flies open at the touch of time. This is the preparation age of soul, the kingdom of Immanuel, of God in man ”

“ But these were fashioned to serve in making man, that he who is an animal endowed with reason might be sure of the distinction of the months, the recurrence of the year, and the variety of the seasons, since through the unequal length of the various periods, and the clear indications given by the changes in its risings, the sun closes the year and the moon renews the months. ”

“ In a religious life, in which a regular distribution of holy employments and duties takes up the whole day, and leaves no interstices of time for idleness, sloth, or the world, hours pass in these exercises with the rapidity of moments, and moments by fervor of the desires bear the value of years. ”

“ Clavius, to meet his view of the amount of that error, put forward the moon's age a day 8 times in 2,500 years. As we cannot enter at full length into the explanation, we must content ourselves with giving a set of rules, independent of tables, by which the reader may find Easter for himself in any year, either by the old Calendar or the new. ”

“ 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. ”