Two years had passed.
Two years! What is it? who can say? Different to every being in the
whole wide range of universal existence, Time is the true chameleon,
and takes its colour entirely from the things through which it glides.
Now gray and dull, now bright and shining, now purple with the mingled
hues of exertion and success, rosy with love and hope, or azure with
faith and confidence! Years, what are they? Nothing: for to many they
have no existence; mere spots in the wide ocean of eternity, which
realize the mathematician's utmost abstraction when he defines a point
as that which hath no parts, or which hath no magnitude--neither
length, breadth, nor thickness. Yet to others how important are years,
how full of events, and feelings, and actions! How often is it that,
in that short space of two years a life is crowded; so that when we
look back at the end of mortal existence, there, gathered into those
four and twenty months, stands out the whole of active being, and all
the rest is idleness and emptiness, the broad selvages of the narrow
strip of cloth.
Two years, too, viewed from different positions in the wide plain of
life, how different do they appear! The prospective and the
retrospective changes them entirely. It is the looking up and looking
down a hill, for the perspective of time is very different from that
of substantial objects. The vanishing point comes close to the eye
when we gaze back; is far, far removed when we gaze forward. At every
period of life, too, it changes, and with every feeling of the heart,
with every passion of our nature. To the young man the two years just
passed stretch far away, filled with incidents and sensations all
bright in their novelty, and vivid to the eye of memory. To the old
man they are but a space, and that space empty. He hardly believes
that the time has flown which has brought him two strides nearer to
the grave. Say to the eager and impetuous youth, two years must pass
before you can possess her whom you love, and you spread out an
eternity before him, full of dangers and disappointments. Tell the
timid clinger to life's frail thread, you can but live two years
longer, and the termination seems at the very door. Pain, pleasure,
hope, fear, thought, study, care, anxiety, our moral habits, our
corporeal sensations, our thirsty wishes, our replete indifference;
all contract or expand the elastic sphere of time, and we find at last
that it is but a phantasm, the sole existence of which is in change.
The sun, and the moon, and the stars, were given, we are told, to be
for signs, and for seasons, and for days, and for years; and
regularity was given to their motions, that order might be in variety;
but variety is not less infinite because all is rendered harmonious,
and regular recurrence only serves to work out spaces in the ever
teeming progress of change. It is not alone that the vast whole does
not present at any time two things exactly alike; but it is that all
things in that whole, and the whole itself, are altering every
instant, and every fraction of an instant, which gives us the infinity
of variety. All is in movement, upon, throughout, and round the earth.
All is undergoing change, but it is the vastness, the violence, the
rapidity of that change, which marks time, or, in other words, marks
the march of the shadow.
Two years had passed with their changes, and of those I shall speak
hereafter. Suns had set and risen, day and night had been, months had
succeeded weeks, hearts were cold that were then warm, eyes were dim
that were then bright, the shade of gray had come upon the glossy
hair, sickness and health had changed places in many a frame, states
had seen revolutions, men had perished and been born, vice and virtue
had triumphed or had failed, monarchs had died, and good and wise men
passed away; shipwreck and flame, and war and pestilence, and accident
and sorrow, had done their part; and bursting forth again from a
thousand different sources, the teeming life of earth had sprung up
and glittered in the sun, as if but the more abundant for that which
had been abstracted from it. The world had grown older, but not less
full; and those who had aided the work, and had undergone the change,
were hardly conscious that it had taken place.
Two years had passed.