CHAPTER VII - On Time

Summary

Time and change are great, only with reference to the faculties of the beings which note them. The insect of an hour, which flutters, during its transient existence, in an atmosphere of perfume, would attribute unchanging duration to the beautiful flowers of the cistus, whose petals cover the dewy grass but a few hours after it has received the lifeless body of the gnat. These flowers, could they reflect, might contrast their transitory lives with the prolonged existence of their greener neighbours. The leaves themselves, counting their brief span by the lapse of a few moons, might regard as almost indefinitely extended the duration of the common parent of both leaf and flower. The lives of individual trees are lost in the continued destruction and renovation which take place in forest masses. Forests themselves, starved by the exhaustion of the soil, or consumed by fire, succeed each other in slow gradation. A forest of oaks waves its luxuriant branches over a spot which has been fertilized by the ashes of a forest of pines. These periods again merge into other and still longer cycles, during which the latest of a thousand forests sinks beneath the waves, from the gradual subsidence of its parent earth; or in which extensive inundations, by accumulating the silt of centuries, gradually convert the living trunks into their stony resemblances.