"'Tis with our watches as our judgments;--none
Go just alike, but each believes his own."

But for all the kindreds and tribes and tongues of men--each upon their
own meridian--from the Arctic pole to the equator, from the equator to
the Antarctic pole, the eternal sun strikes twelve at noon, and the
glorious constellations, far up in the everlasting belfries of the
skies, chime twelve at midnight;--twelve for the pale student over his
flickering lamp; twelve amid the flaming glories of Orion's belt, if he
crosses the meridian at that fated hour; twelve by the weary couch of
languishing humanity; twelve in the star-paved courts of the Empyrean;
twelve for the heaving tides of the ocean; twelve for the weary arm of
labor; twelve for the toiling brain; twelve for the watching, waking,
broken heart; twelve for the meteor which blazes for a moment and
expires; twelve for the comet whose period is measured by centuries;
twelve for every substantial, for every imaginary thing, which exists in
the sense, the intellect, or the fancy, and which the speech or thought
of man, at the given meridian, refers to the lapse of time.

Not only do we resort to the observation of the heavenly bodies for the
means of regulating and rectifying our clocks, but the great divisions
of day and month and year are derived from the same source. By the
constitution of our nature, the elements of our existence are closely
connected with celestial times. Partly by his physical organization,
partly by the experience of the race from the dawn of creation, man as
he is, and the times and seasons of the heavenly bodies, are part and
parcel of one system. The first great division of time, the day-night
(nychthemerum), for which we have no precise synonym in our language,
with its primal alternation of waking and sleeping, of labor and rest,