Minuet

“ When we wind up a clock that is out of order, to make it go well for the future, we do not immediately set the hand to the present instant, but we make it strike the round of all its hours, before it can recover the regularity of its time. Such, thought I, shall be my method this evening; and since it is that day of the year which I dedicate to the memory of such in another life as I much delighted in when living, an hour or two shall be sacred to sorrow and their memory, while I run over all the melancholy circumstances of this kind which have occurred to me in my whole life. ”

“ The mainspring being broken in his mind,
A clock himself, if one were so inclined,
That stood at twenty minutes after three—
The reason being for this, it might be said,
That things in death were neither clocks nor people, but only dead. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Min′ute-bell, a bell sounded at regular intervals of one minute, in morning; Min′ute-book, a book containing minutes or short notes; Min′ute-glass, a glass the sand of which measures a minute in running out; Min′ute-gun, a gun discharged every minute, as a signal of distress or mourning; Min′ute-hand, the hand that indicates the minutes on a clock or watch; Min′ute-jack (Shak.) , a little figure that strikes the bell of the clock: a flighty, unstable person; Min′ute-man, a man ready to turn out at a minute's warning—the name taken by a body of militia in the American war of independence ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ When the eye longs for the light, and the moon rises behind the firs, reflecting their tapering tops against the bright rock opposite, it appears to us like the dead hand of a clock which was once wound up, and will some day cease to strike. ”

“ Hush, Louisa! Don't let me hear that odious excuse again. Suppose it was only for a minute. Have you any more right to do wrong for a minute than for a day? You are always saying—'only a minute,' 'just a minute,' but your minutes are very apt to lengthen into hours. It was your stopping 'just a minute' when you were sent on an important errand which almost cost the poor little baby its life, last summer. It is your stopping 'just a minute' to read or play or do something else to please yourself, which makes you late at breakfast, at school, and at church ”

“ Two o'clock, the morning of October 12th, 1915.
TO her accustomed eyes
The midnight-morning brought not such a dread
As thrills the chance-awakened head that lies
In trivial sleep on the habitual bed. ”

“ I pressed the lever over to its extreme position. The night came like the turning out of a lamp, and in another moment came to-morrow. The laboratory grew faint and hazy, then fainter and ever fainter. To-morrow night came black, then day again, night again, day again, faster and faster still. An eddying murmur filled my ears and a strange, dumb confusedness descended on my mind.
"I am afraid I cannot convey the peculiar sensations of time-traveling. They are excessively unpleasant. There is a feeling exactly like that one has upon a switchback—of a helpless headlong motion! ”

“ 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 daylight grew, minute by minute, on the dull parallelogram of the blind, and minute by minute that horrible thing on the bed took something of distinctness. The strain beat me at last. I fetched a veritable yell to give myself courage, and, reaching for the cord, pulled up the blind as fast as it would go. ”

“ When this has sunk to a level with the second bar of the grate, the maid replenishes it with a hod of anthracite; and I sit musing and reading, while the new coal warms and kindles—not leaving my place, until it has sunk to the third bar of the grate, which marks my bedtime.
I love these accidental measures of the hours, which belong to you, and your life, and not to the world. A watch is no more the measure of your time, than of the time of your neighbors; a church clock is as public and vulgar as a church-warden. ”

“ The clock strikes with a steady pulse, though sometimes it seems in a fever—sometimes in a fit. At any rate we have some fixed standard to correct the calculation of our waking time; but in dreams the standard itself is visionary. ”

“ 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. ”

“ This feeling arises, I should fancy, from the preponderance of light on that half of the dial on which the finger seems to be travelling upwards, compared with the half on which it seems to be travelling downwards. This light to the eye, the mind translates into time. Summer days are long, often wearisomely so. The long-lighted days are bracketed together by a little bar of twilight, in which but a star or two find time to twinkle. ”

“ When he recovers his senses, the hand of the clock has moved on ten minutes. Torn by fears and suspense, he listens with all his ears. He hears faint movements on the floor above. The minutes pass; twenty minutes pass. ”

“ You'll excuse me if I ask you to be short with me, for my work is great, and my time is but short. Methinks every time we hear a Clock, or see a Watch, we have an admonition given us, that our Time is upon the wing, and it will all be gone within a little while. I remember I have read of a famous man, who having a Clock-watch long lying by him, out of Kilture in his Trunk, it unaccountably struck Eleven just before he died. Why, there are many of you, for whom I am to do that office this day: I am to tell you You are come to your Eleventh hour ”

“ The watch, with a punctuality worthy to be imitated by all of us, not only at the appointed hour, but at the very minute itself, commenced such a whirring noise, that the sleeper was immediately awakened, arose at once, and prepared herself for the duties of the day. ”

“ You must know that it is impossible to follow the pendulum of the clock with the hand, and to repeat “Here she goes—there she goes,” just as it swings to and fro, that is, when people are talking all round you, as it puts you out. ”

“ People went to bed early in those days, and the watchman raised his voice at eight o’clock. From that hour until four in the morning he sang his song, [Pg 39] every hour a new verse, supposed to have special reference to the time of night. The curious commingling of pious exhortation with homely advice on the everyday affairs of domestic life was characteristic of the time and of the people. At ten o’clock he put in a pointed reminder to the laggard that it was time to turn in, thus:
[Listen (.mp3) ] [Music XML (.mxl) ]
Ho, watchman! ”

“ The ten o'clock bell is going to ring in two minutes. Our day is divided into sections by bells. We eat and sleep and study by bells. It's very enlivening; I feel like a fire horse all of the time. There it goes! ”

“ Time had laid aside its wing, and put on shoes of lead. She flew no longer, but walked like an aged woman. How long an hour seems, when you count the seconds! How terribly a day stretches out when, with wakeful but wearied eyes, you long for its close! ”

“ 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. ”

“ You bathe in the Channel in the very prose of the day. Nothing in the world is more uninteresting than eleven o’clock. It is the hour of mediocrity under the best conditions; but eleven o’clock on a shingly beach, in a half-hearted summer, is a very common thing. Twelve has a dignity always, and everywhere its name is great. The noon of every day that ever dawned is in its place heroic ”

“ If the clock strikes, the sound jars me; a million of hours will not bring back peace to my breast. The light startles me; the darkness terrifies me. I seem falling into a pit, without a hand to help me. ”

“ 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. ”

“ To measure time by the state of our feelings would be as futile as an attempt to measure space by the slowness or impetuosity of our movements. Hours dwindle into minutes, and minutes are exaggerated into hours, according to the circumstances under which the mind moves on. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The early dawn, that is to say, four o'clock in winter, and in midsummer, as now, often two o'clock, has for years found me in my office, reading, calculating, drawing, and now, since I have had this book on hand, for the most part writing. I have all my life been a good sleeper, so far that my sleep is very profound and mostly dreamless: but I have long accustomed myself to do with half the sleep that others find indispensable. ”

“ Even so the ticking of the clock may pass unnoticed in the sense that it is an undiscriminated element in the background of our consciousness; but if the ticking comes to a sudden stop, the feeling of a void in our consciousness proclaims the fact that something has gone out from it. ”

“ The minute which is gone can never be recalled, while the next minute is fraught with uncertainty. We are sure—not of this minute, but of this instant only, of time. Then, while we may, let us say the loving word, do the kind act, suppress the unkind remark, encourage those who are struggling by the way—this minute. ”

“ With me, if I am wakeful and I wish to visit some friend at three o’clock in the morning, immediately I ring my bell, I wake everybody, I am dressed, I demand the carriage or the automobile, or the aeroplane, and I go to visit my friend. I wish to visit, and I visit! What is more natural? Does the clock rule the inclinations or the reputations? ”

“ I went to bed at ten o'clock, for the purpose of securing a good night's rest, and of being fresh and vigorous in the morning, but eleven, twelve, and one found me wide awake; nor could I have lain in a state of unconsciousness much above an hour when the sound of the bugle restored me to my senses. ”

“ In painting or writing, hours are melted almost into minutes: the mind, absorbed in the eagerness of its pursuit, forgets the time necessary to accomplish it; and, indeed, the clock often finds us employed on the same thought or part of a picture that occupied us when it struck last. ”

“ Do we observe how quickly we shoot by it? Do we mark with what increasing swiftness the line of our life seems reeling off, and how close we are coming to the end? Time never stops! Each tick of the clock echoes our advancing footsteps. ”

“ She takes it out every instant to look at the moment-hand. She lugs us out into the fields, because there the bird-boys ask you, "Pray, sir, can you tell us what's o'clock?" and she answers them punctually. She loses all her time looking to see "what the time is." ”