[William Hazlitt (1778-1830) was one of the three great essayists and writers of nonfiction (e.g., history, biography, literary criticism, philosophy, political science, autobiography, miscellaneous essays) of the Romantic era in British literature--the first third of the nineteenth century. (The other two great British nonfiction writers of this era are Thomas De Quincey and Charles Lamb.) His collected works, principally nonfiction of all kinds, take up twenty-one volumes in the authoritative collected edition; his essays span subjects from the sweeping, abstract, or philosophical (including aesthetic) to the small (e.g., coverage of a particular boxing match in "The Fight") and autobiographical (e.g., "On Going on a Journey").

        Many of Hazlitt's essays originally appeared in periodicals--newspapers and magazines--of his time. "On a Sundial," for example, first appeared in New Monthly Magazine, October 1827. (It was later reprinted in his book Sketches and Essays [1839], and subsequently in his collected works.) The Romantic era emphasized the importance of feeling, which accounts for Hazlitt's numerous exclamation marks and exclamatory sentences (e.g., "What . . . !" and "How . . . !") in "On a Sundial"; the era, however, did not ignore acute, reflective thoughtfulness and perceptiveness, as shown by Hazlitt's many insights about time and its relation to humanity in this essay. Despite the exclamatory and feeling earnestness of its authors, the era also did not preclude humor and irony, as exemplified by the writing of Hazlitt generally and in this essay. Laurence Sterne's eighteenth-century novel Tristram Shandy, to which Hazlitt repeatedly refers or alludes in "On a Sundial," is a good example of the blend of philosophy and quirky humor (and irony) to be found in Hazlitt's essay.

        Like the other great writers of nonfiction prose, Hazlitt has an admirable prose style that should be studied and emulated. His sentence variety (every composition handbook has a chapter on sentence variety), achieved through different sentence lengths and different sentence structures, not only helps avoid monotony, but also helps express ideas. For example, his sentence interrupter in "For myself, as I rode along the Brenta . . . comfortable" (par. 1) helps suggest the leisureliness of Hazlitt's travel, while also adding additional detail, the specifics and illustrations that help a reader see in the mind's eye of reader what the writer is talking about. Hazlitt also uses the stylistic elements of parallelism, antithesis, balanced sentences, balanced antithesis, allusion, understatement, and figurative language to express, convey, or communicate his ideas and observations.

        As you read the following essay, keep in mind how time and timepieces occur all around you every day of your life. Do they have effects on you every day, or cumulatively, comparable to or contrasting with those they had on Hazlitt, as he describes in his essay?

        [1] Horas non numero nisi serenas ["I do not number hours unless they are serene"]--is the motto of a sundial near Venice. There is a softness and a harmony in the words and in the thought unparalleled. Of all conceits, it is surely the most classical. "I count only the hours that are serene." What a bland and care-dispelling feeling! How the shadows seem to fade on the dial-plate as the sky lours, and time presents only a blank unless as its progress is marked by what is joyous, and all that is not happy sinks into oblivion! What a fine lesson is conveyed to the mind--to take no note of time but by its benefits, to watch only for the smiles and neglect the frowns of fate, to compose our lives of bright and gentle moments, turning always to the sunny side of things, and letting the rest slip from our imaginations, unheeded or forgotten! How different from the common art of self-tormenting! For myself, as I rode along the Brenta, while the sun shone hot upon its sluggish, slimy waves, my sensations were far from comfortable; but the reading this inscription on the side of a glaring wall in an instant restored me to myself; and still, whenever I think of or repeat it, it has the power of wafting me into the region of pure and blissful abstraction. I cannot help fancying it to be a legend of Popish superstition. Some monk of the dark ages must have invented and bequeathed it to us, who, loitering in trim gardens and watching the silent march of time, as his fruits ripened in the sun or his flowers scented the balmy air, felt a mild languor pervade his senses, and having little to do or to care for, determined (in imitation of his sundial) to efface that little from his thoughts or draw a veil over it, making of his life one long dream of quiet! Horas non numero nisi serenas--he might repeat, when the heavens were overcast and the gathering storm scattered the falling leaves, and turn to his books and wrap himself in his golden studies! Out of some such mood of mind, indolent, elegant, thoughtful, this exquisite device (speaking volumes) must have originated.

        [2] Of the several modes of counting time, that by the sundial is perhaps the most apposite and striking, if not the most convenient or comprehensive. It does not obtrude its observations, though it "morals on the time,"* and, by its stationary character, forms a contrast to the most fleeting of all essences. It stands sub dio--under the marble air, and there is some connection between the image of infinity and eternity. I should also like to have a sunflower growing near it with bees fluttering around. (Is this a verbal fallacy? Or in the close, retired, sheltered scene that I have imagined to myself, is not the sunflower a natural accompaniment of the sundial?) It should be of iron to denote duration, and have a dull, leaden look. I hate a sundial made of wood, which is rather calculated to show the variations of the seasons than the progress of time, slow, silent, imperceptible, checkered with light and shade. If our hours were all serene, we might probably take almost as little note of them as the dial does of those that are clouded. It is the shadow thrown across, which gives us warning of their flight. Otherwise, our impressions would take the same indistinguishable hue; we should scarce be conscious of our existence. Those who have had none of the cares of this life to harass and disturb them have been obliged to have recourse to the hopes and fears of the next to enliven the prospect before them.

        [3] Most of the methods for measuring the lapse of time have, I believe, been the contrivance of monks and religious recluses, who, finding time hang heavy on their hands, were at some pains to see how they got rid of it. The hourglass is, I suspect, an older invention; and it is certainly the most defective of all. Its creeping sands are not indeed an unapt emblem of the minute, countless portions of our existence; and the manner in which they gradually slide through the hollow glass and diminish in number till not a single one is left also illustrates the way in which our years slip from us by stealth; but as a mechanical invention, it is rather a hindrance than a help, for it requires to have the time, of which it pretends to count the precious moments, taken up in attention to itself, and in seeing that when one end of the glass is empty, we turn it around in order that it may go on again, or else all our labor is lost and we must wait for some other mode of ascertaining the time before we can recover our reckoning and proceed as before. The philosopher in his cell, the cottager at her spinning-wheel must, however, find an invaluable acquisition in this "companion of the lonely hour," as it has been called (by Bloomfield in his poem "The Widow to Her Hourglass"), which not only serves to tell how the time goes but also to fill up its vacancies. What a treasure must not the little box seem to hold, as if it were a sacred deposit of the very grains and fleeting sands of life! What a business, in lieu of other more important avocations, to see it out to the last sand, and then to renew the process again on the instant, that there may not be the least flaw or error in the account! What a strong sense must be brought home to the mind of the value and irrecoverable nature of the time that is fled; what a thrilling, incessant consciousness of the slippery tenure by which we hold what remains of it! Our very existence must seem crumbling to atoms and running down (without a miraculous reprieve) to the last fragment. "Dust to dust, and ashes to ashes" is a text that might be fairly inscribed on an hourglass: it is ordinarily associated with the scythe of Time and a Death's-head, as a memento mor[t]i, and has, no doubt, furnished many a tacit hint to the apprehensive and visionary enthusiast in favor of a resurrection to another life!

        [4] The French give a different turn to things, less sombre [somber] and less edifying. A common and also a very pleasing ornament to a clock in Paris is a figure of Time seated in a boat which Cupid is rowing along, with the motto L'Amour fait passer le Temps ["Love makes Time pass"]--which the wits again have travestied into Le Temps fait passer L'Amour ["Time makes Love pass"]. All this is ingenious and well; but it wants* sentiment. I like a people who have something that they love and something that they hate and with whom everything is not alike a matter of indifference or pour passer le temps ["to make time pass"]. The French attach no importance to anything except for the moment; they are only thinking how they shall get rid of one sensation for another; all their ideas are in transitu ["in transit"]. Everything is detached; nothing is accumulated. It would be a million years before a Frenchman would think of the Horas non numero nisi serenas. Its impassioned repose and ideal voluptuousness are as far from their breasts as the poetry of that line in Shakespeare, "How sweet the moonlight sleeps upon that bank!" [The Merchant of Venice, Act 5, Scene 1]. They never arrive at the classical--or the romantic. They blow the bubbles of vanity, fashion, and pleasure; but they do not expand their perceptions into refinement or strengthen them into solidity. Where there is nothing fine in the groundwork of the imagination, nothing fine in the superstructure can be produced. They are light, airy, fanciful (to give them their due); but when they attempt to be serious (beyond mere good sense), they are either dull or extravagant. When the volatile salt has flown off, nothing but a caput mortuum ["dead head," "worthless residue"] remains.* They have infinite crotchets and caprices with their clocks and watches, which seem made for anything but to tell the hour--gold repeaters*, watches with metal covers, clocks with hands to count the seconds.

        [5] There is no escaping from quackery and impertinence, even in our attempts to calculate the waste of time. The years gallop fast enough for me without remarking every moment as it flies; and further, I must say I dislike a watch (whether of French or English manufacture) that comes to me like a footpad with its face muffled and does not present its clear, open aspect like a friend and point with its finger to the time of day.* All this opening and shutting of dull, heavy cases (under pretense that the glass-lid is liable to be broken or lets in the dust or air and obstructs the movement of the watch) is not to husband time but to give trouble. It is mere pomposity and self-importance like consulting a mysterious oracle that one carries about with one in one's pocket instead of asking a common question of an acquaintance or companion.

        [6] There are two clocks which strike the hour in the room where I am. This I do not like. In the first place, I do not want to be reminded twice how the time goes (it is like the second tap of a saucy servant at your door when perhaps you have no wish to get up); in the next place, it is starting a difference of opinion on the subject, and I am averse to every appearance of wrangling and disputation. Time moves on the same, whatever disparity there may be in our mode of keeping count of it, like true fame in spite of the cavils and contradictions of the critics. I am no friend to repeating watches*. The only pleasant association I have with them is the account given by [Jean Jacques] Rousseau [in his Confessions] of some French lady who sat up reading [Rousseau's novel] New Heloise when it first came out, and ordering her maid to sound the repeater, found it was too late to go to bed and continued reading on till morning.* Yet how different is the interest excited by this story from the account which Rousseau somewhere else [in his Confessions] gives of his sitting up with his father reading romances, when a boy, till they were startled by the swallows twittering in their nests at daybreak, and the father cried out, half angry and ashamed, "Allons, mon fils; je suis plus enfant que toi!" ["Let's be off, my son; I am more a child than you, dear one!"]. In general, I have heard repeating watches sounded in stagecoaches at night when some fellow traveler suddenly awaking and wondering what was the hour, another has very deliberately taken out his watch and pressing the spring it has counted out the time, each petty stroke acting like a sharp puncture on the ear and informing me of the dreary hours I had already passed and of the more dreary ones I had to wait till morning.

        [7] 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 mouthpieces 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. But to do this, they must be unexpected and involuntary--there must be no trick in the case--they should not be squeezed out with a finger and a thumb; there should be nothing optional, personal in their occurrence; they should be like stern, inflexible monitors that nothing can prevent from discharging their duty.

        [8] Surely, if there is anything with which we should not mix up our vanity and self consequence, it is with Time, the most independent of all things. All the sublimity, all the superstition, that hang upon this palpable mode of announcing its flight are chiefly attached to this circumstance. Time would lose its abstracted character if we kept it like a curiosity or a jack-in-the-box: its prophetic warnings would have no effect if it obviously spoke only at our prompting like a paltry ventriloquism. The clock that tells the coming, dreaded hour--the castle bell that "with its brazen throat and iron tongue sounds one unto the drowsy ear of night"*--the curfew "swinging slow with sullen roar"* o'er wizard stream or fountain--are like a voice from other worlds, big with unknown events. The last sound, which is still kept up as an old custom in many parts of England, is a great favorite with me. I used to hear it when a boy. It tells a tale of other times. The days that are past, the generations that are gone, the tangled forest glades and hamlets brown of my native country, the woodsman's art, the Norman warrior armed for the battle or in his festive hall, the conqueror's iron rule and peasant's lamp extinguished--all start up at the clamorous peal and fill my mind with fear and wonder. I confess, nothing at present interests me but what has been--the recollection of the impressions of my early life or events long past, of which only the dim traces remain in a smoldering ruin or half-obsolete custom. That things should be that are now no more, creates in my mind the most unfeigned astonishment. I cannot solve the mystery of the past nor exhaust my pleasure in it. The years, the generations to come, are nothing to me. We care no more about the world in the year 2300 than we do about one of the planets. Even George IV is better than the Earl of Windsor. We might as well make a voyage to the moon as think of stealing a march upon Time with impunity. De non apparentibus et non existentibus eadem est ratio ["The invisible and the nonexistent are to be accounted the same"]. Those who are to come after us and push us from the stage seem like upstarts and pretenders who may be said to exist in vacuo ["outside reality"], we know not upon what except as they are blown up with vain and self conceit by their patrons among the moderns. But the ancients are true and bona fide people to whom we are bound by aggregate knowledge and filial ties and in whom, seen by the mellow light of history, we feel our own existence doubled and our pride consoled as we ruminate on the vestiges of the past. The public in general, however, does not carry this speculative indifference about the future to what is to happen to themselves or to the part they are to act in the busy scene. For my own part, I do; and the only wish I can form or that ever prompts the passing sigh would be to live some of my years over again--they would be those in which I enjoyed and suffered most!

        [9] The ticking of a clock in the night has nothing very interesting nor very alarming in it, though superstition has magnified it into an omen. In a state of vigilance or debility, it preys upon the spirits like the persecution of a teasing pertinacious insect, and haunting the imagination after it has ceased in reality, is converted into the death-watch. Time is rendered vast by contemplating its minute portions thus repeatedly and painfully urged upon our attention, as the ocean in its immensity is composed of water drops. A clock striking with a clear and silver sound is a great relief in such circumstances, breaks the spell, and resembles a sylph-like and friendly spirit in the room. Foreigners, with all their tricks and contrivances upon clocks and timepieces, are strangers to the sound of village-bells, though perhaps a people who can dance may dispense with them. They impart a pensive, wayward pleasure to the mind and are a kind of chronology of happy events, often serious in the retrospect--births, marriages, and so forth. [Samuel Taylor] Coleridge* calls them "the poor man's only music" [in his poem "Frost at Midnight," line 29]. A village spire in England peeping from its cluster of trees is always associated in imagination with this cheerful accompaniment and may be expected to pour its joyous tidings on the gale. In Catholic countries, you are stunned with the everlasting tolling of bells to prayers or for the dead. In the Apennines and other wild and mountainous districts of Italy, the little chapel bell with its simple tinkling sound has a romantic and charming effect. The monks in former times appear to have taken a pride in the construction of bells as well as churches; and some of those of the great cathedrals abroad (as at Cologne and Rouen) may be fairly said to be hoarse with counting the flight of ages. The chimes in Holland are a nuisance. They dance in the hours and the quarters. They leave no respite to the imagination. Before one set has done ringing in your ears, another begins. You do not know whether the hours move or stand still, go backwards or forwards, so fantastical and perplexing are their accompaniments. Time is a more staid personage and not so full of gambols. It puts you in mind of a tune with variations or of an embroidered dress. Surely, nothing is more simple than time. His march is straightforward; but we should have leisure allowed us to look back upon the distance we have come and not be counting his steps every moment. Time in Holland is a foolish old fellow with all the antics of a youth, who "goes to church in a coranto, and lights his pipe in a cinque-pace"*. The chimes with us, on the contrary, as they come in every three or four hours, are like stages in the journey of the day. They give a fillip to the lazy, creeping hours and relieve the lassitude of country places. At noon, their desultory, trivial song is diffused through the hamlet with the odor of rashes of bacon; at the close of day, they send the toil-worn sleepers to their beds. Their discontinuance would be a great loss to the thinking or unthinking public. Mr. [William] Wordsworth has painted their effect on the mind when he makes [in his poem "The Fountain"] his friend Matthew, in a fit of inspired dotage, "Sing those witty rhymes/ About the crazy old church clock/ And the bewilder'd chimes."*

        [10] The tolling of the bells for deaths and executions is a fearful summons, though as it announces not the advance of time but the approach of fate, it happily makes no part of our subject. Otherwise, the "sound of the bell" for Macheath's execution in the Beggar's Opera [by John Gay] or for that of the conspirators in Venice Preserved [by Thomas Otway], with the roll of the drum at a soldier's funeral and a digression to that of my Uncle Toby as it is so finely described by [Laurence] Sterne [in his novel Tristram Shandy] would furnish ample topics to descant upon. If I were a moralist, I might disapprove the ringing in the new and ringing out the old year: "Why dance ye, mortals, o'er the grave of Time?"* St. Paul's bell* tolls only for the death of our English kings or a distinguished personage or two, with long intervals between. (Rousseau has admirably described the effect of bells on the imagination in a passage in the Confessions, beginning "Le son des cloches m'a toujuours singulierement affecté" ["The sound of bells has always particularly affected me"]).

        [11] Those who have no artificial means of ascertaining the progress of time are in general the most acute in discerning its immediate signs and are most retentive of individual dates. The mechanical aids to knowledge are not sharpeners of the wits. The understanding of a savage is a kind of natural almanac and more true in its prognostication of the future. In his mind's eye, he sees what has happened or what is likely to happen to him "as in a map the voyager his course"*. Those who read the times and seasons in the aspect of the heavens and the configurations of the stars, who count by moons and know when the sun rises and sets, are by no means ignorant of their own affairs or of the common concatenation of events. People in such situations have not their faculties distracted by any multiplicity of inquiries beyond what befalls themselves and the outward appearances that mark the change. There is, therefore, a simplicity and clearness in the knowledge they possess, which often puzzles the more learned. I am sometimes surprised at a shepherd boy by the roadside, who sees nothing but the earth and sky, asking me the time of day--he ought to know so much better than anyone how far the sun is above the horizon. I suppose he wants to ask a question of a passenger [i.e., pedestrian] or to see if he has a watch. Robinson Crusoe [in Daniel Defoe's novel of that name] lost his reckoning in the monotony of his life and that bewildering dream of solitude and was fain to have recourse to the notches in a piece of wood. What a diary was his! And how time must have spread its circuit around him, vast and pathless as the ocean!

        [12] For myself, I have never had a watch nor any other mode of keeping time in my possession, nor ever wish to learn how time goes. It is a sign I have had little to do, few avocations, few engagements. When I am in a town, I can hear the clock; and when I am in the country, I can listen to the silence. What I like best is to lie whole mornings on a sunny bank on Salisbury Plain without any object before me, neither knowing nor caring how time passes and thus "with light-winged toys of feathered Idleness"* to melt down hours to moments. Perhaps some such thoughts as I have here set down float before me like motes before my half-shut eyes, or some vivid image of the past by forcible contrast rushes by me--"Diana and her fawn, and all the glories of the antique world"*; then I start away to prevent the iron from entering my soul and let fall some tears into that stream of time that separates me farther and farther from all I once loved! At length, I rouse myself from reverie, and [go] home to dinner, proud of killing time with thought, nay even without thinking. Somewhat of this idle humor I inherit from my father, though he had not the same freedom from ennui, for he was not a metaphysician, and there were stops and vacant intervals in his being which he did not know how to fill up. He used in these cases and as an obvious resource carefully to wind up his watch at night and "with lackluster eye"* more than once in the course of the day look to see what o'clock it was. Yet he had nothing else in his character in common with the elder Mr. Shandy [in Laurence Sterne's novel Tristram Shandy]. Were I to attempt a sketch of him for my own or the reader's satisfaction, it would be after the following manner:--but now I recollect I have done something of the kind once before and were I to resume the subject here, some bat or owl of a critic with spectacled gravity might swear I had stolen the whole of this essay from myself--or (what is worse) from him! So I had better let it go as it is.
 
 
 

[Notes

"morals on the time" (par. 2): from Shakespeare's As You Like It, Act 2, Scene 7; "it wants sentiment" (par. 3): "it lacks sentiment"; "volatile salt" and caput mortuum (par. 3) are technical terms from alchemy; "face muffled . . . to the time of day" (par. 4): in this era there are only pocket watches, not wrist watches, and many pocket watches had a metal cover that had to be clicked open to see the watch face--such watches are still sold in stores; "gold repeaters" (par. 4) are the same as "repeating watches" (par. 6): pocket watches that would give an audible signal of the time with a little chime marking the hour when a button was pressed; "lend it both an understanding and a tongue" (par. 7): ; "with its brazen throat . . . of night" (par. ): from Shakespeare's King John, Act 3, Scene 3; "swinging slow . . . roar" (par. ): from Milton's poem Il Penseroso ("The Sad, Serious [Temperament]"); Samuel Taylor Coleridge (par. 9): listed in collegiate dictionary; founder with William Wordsworth of British Romantic poetry, and also a preacher, literary critic, and philosopher; "poor man's only music": from Coleridge's poem "Frost at Midnight"; "goes to church . . . cinque-pace" (par. 9): Shakespeare's Twelfth Night, Act 1, Scene 3--the "coranto" and "cinque-pace" are kinds of dance; "Sing those witty . . . chimes" (par. 9): from William Wordsworth's poem "The Fountain"; "Why dance ye mortals . . . " (par. 10): ; "St. Paul's bell" (par. 10): the bell of St. Paul's church in London; "as in a map . . . "(par. 11): William Cowper's poem The Task, Book 6; "light-winged toys . . . "(par. 12): ; "Diana and her fawn . . . "(par. 12): ; "with lackluster eye" (par. 12): ;]
 

[Vocabulary

aesthetic (intro, par.1); acute (intro, par.2; also Hazlitt, par. 11); quirky (intro, par. 2); dials* (epigraph, above par. 1); serene (par. 1); conceits* (par. 1); bland (par. 1); dispelling (par. 1); lours (par. 1); blank* (par. 1); oblivion (par. 1); Brenta (par. 1); sluggish (par. 1); glaring* (in "glaring wall") (par. 1), blissful (par. 1), abstraction (par. 1), fancying* (par. 1), Popish (par. 1); bequeathed (par. 1); trim* (in "trim gardens") (par. 1); languor (par. 1), pervade (par. 1); efface (par. 1); indolent (par. 1); exquisite (par. 1); modes (par. 2); apposite (par. 2); obtrude (par. 2); character* (par. 2); fleeting (par. 2); sub dio (par. 2); close* (par. 2); retired* (par. 2); denote (par. 2); duration (par. 2); imperceptible (par. 2); hue (par. 2); harass (par. 2); recourse (par. 2); prospect (par. 2); contrivance (par. 3); recluses (par. 3); unapt (par. 3); minute* (as adjective) (par. 3, 9); stealth (par. 3); ascertaining (par. 3); reckoning (par. 3); cell* (par. 3); spinning-wheel (par. 3); invaluable (par. 3); acquisition (par. 3); in lieu of (par. 3); avocations (par. 3, par. 12); incessant (par. 3); tenure (par. 3); atoms* (par. 3); reprieve (par. 3); scythe (par. 3); Death's head (par. 3); memento mor[t]i (par. 3); tacit (par. 3); apprehensive (par. 3); somber (par. 4); edifying (par. 4); travestied (par. 4); wants* (par. 4); impassioned (par. 4); repose (par. 4); voluptuousness (par. 4); superstructure (par. 4); volatile (par. 4); volatile salt* (par. 4); crotchets (par. 4); caprices (par. 4); repeaters* (par. 4); quackery (par. 5); impertinence (par. 5); remarking* (in "remarking every moment") (par. 5); footpad (par. 5); husband* (as verb) (par. 5); pomposity (par. 5); saucy (par. 6); averse (par. 6); wrangling (par. 6); disputation (par. 6); disparity (par. 6); cavils (par. 6); contradictions* (in "contradictions of the critics") (par. 6); Jean Jacques Rousseau (par. 6); petty (par. 6); dreary (par. 6); dumb* (par. 7); audible (par. 7); reflections* (par. 7); intermittent (par. 7); involuntary (par. 7); inflexible (par. 7); monitors (noun) (par. 7); discharging (par. 7); sublimity (par. 8); palpable (par. 8); abstracted (par. 8); curiosity* (par. 8); paltry (par. 8); brazen (par. 8); glades (par. 8); hamlets (par. 8); Norman (par. 8); clamorous (par. 8); peal (par. 8); unfeigned (par. 8); George IV (par. 8); Earl (par. 8); Windsor (par. 8); stealing a march upon (par. 8); impunity (par. 8); upstarts (par. 8); patrons (par. 8); bona fide (par. 8); aggregate (adj) (par. 8); filial (par. 8); ruminate (par. 8); vestiges (par. 8); speculative (par. 8); vigilance (par. 9); debility (par. 9); pertinacious (par. 9); contemplating (par. 9); silver* (in "silver sound") (par. 9); sylph (par. 9); contrivances (par. 9); impart (par. 9); pensive (par. 9), wayward (par. 9); chronology (par. 9); retrospect (par. 9); Apennines (par. 9); Cologne* (par. 9); Rouen (par. 9); fairly* ("may be fairly said") (par. 9); quarters* (par. 9); respite (par. 9); fantastical (par. 9); perplexing (par. 9); staid (par. 9); gambols (par. 9); fillip (par. 9); lassitude (par. 9); desultory (par. 9); diffused (par. 9); rashes* (par. 9); dotage (par. 9); descant (par. 10); ascertaining (par. 11); discerning (par. 11); retentive (par. 11); almanac (par. 11); prognostication (par. 11); aspect* ("aspect of the heavens") (par. 11); configurations (par. 11); concatenation (par. 11); faculties (par. 11); solitude (par. 11); fain (par. 11); recourse (par. 11); circuit (par. 11); Salisbury (par. 12); motes (par. 12); Diana (par. 12); antique* ("antique world") (par. 12); reverie (par. 12); humor* (par. 12); ennui (par. 12); stops* (par. 12); lackluster (par. 12); gravity* (par. 12)]