Time is like a fashionable host,
That slightly shakes his parting guest by th’ hand,
But with his arms outstretch’d, as he would fly,
Grasps the incomer.
Sir Walter Scott thus paints Time’s evanescence:
Time rolls his ceaseless course.—The race of yore,
Who danced our infancy upon their knee,
And told our marvelling boyhood legends store
Of their strange ’ventures happ’d by land or sea,
How are they blotted from the things that be!
Cowley has this significant couplet:
To things immortal Time can do no wrong,
And that which never is to die for ever must be young.
Yet, what a treasure is this:
My inheritance! how wide and fair!
Time is my estate; to Time I’m heir.
_Wilhelm Meister:_ Carlyle.
“Time is almost a human word, and change entirely a human idea: in the
system of nature we should rather say progress than change. The sun
appears to sink in the ocean in darkness, but rises in another
hemisphere; the ruins of a city fall, but they are often used to form
more magnificent structures, as at Rome; but even when they are
destroyed, so as to produce only dust, nature asserts her empire over
them, and the vegetable world rises in constant youth, and in a period
of annual successions, by the labours of man, providing food, vitality,
and beauty upon the wreck of monuments which were once raised for
purposes of glory, but which are now applied to objects of utility.”
As this beautiful passage was written by Sir Humphry Davy nearly
three-and-thirty years since, the above use of the word _progress_ had
nothing to do with the semi-political sense in which it is now commonly
employed. Nevertheless, there occur in the writings of our great
chemical philosopher occasional views of the advancement of the world in
knowledge, and its real authors, with which the progressists of the
present day fraternise.
At the above distance, Davy wrote in the following vein: “In the common
history of the world, as compiled by authors in general, almost all the
great changes of nations are confounded with changes in their dynasties;
and events are usually referred either to sovereigns, chiefs, heroes, or
their armies, which do, in fact, originate entirely from different
causes, either of an intellectual or moral nature. Governments depend
far more than is generally supposed upon the opinion of the people and
the spirit of the age and nation. It sometimes happens that a gigantic
mind possesses supreme power, and rises superior to the age in which he
is born: such was Alfred in England, and Peter in Russia. Such instances
are, however, very rare; and in general it is neither amongst sovereigns
nor the higher classes of society that the great improvers and
benefactors of mankind are to be found.”—_Consolations in Travel_, pp.
34, 35.
Brilliant as was Davy’s own career, it had its life-struggles: his last
days were embittered with sufferings, mental as well as physical; and in
these moments he may have written these somewhat querulous remarks.