The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce, Volume 8

um of a clock is more persistent of iteration than are all existing things; periodicity is the ultimate law and largest explanation of the universe-to do it over again the one insatiable ambit

l notation, so that our senses may apprehend them! In all we do we unconsciously mark time like a clock, the leader of an orchestra with his baton only more perfectly than the smith with his hammer, or the woman with her needle, because his hand is better assisted by his ear, l

of our work as we do a false note in music, and are mightily enamored of ourselves afterward for the power of application which was simply inability to desist. In this rhythm of

only rhythmic movement, pure and simple, undebased with any element of utility, but is capable of performance under conditions positively baneful, is for these reasons the most engag

ay be referred to it, space being the correlative of time, and color the correlative of tone. We are fond of arranging our minute intervals of time into groups. We find certain of these groups highly agreeable, while others are no end unpleasant. In the former there is a singular regularity to be observed, which

ing, cook, peasant, clown, and all that kind of people, to follow him through the land; and in the myth of the Pied Piper of Hamelin we discern abundant reason to think the instinct of rhythm an attribute of rats. Soldiers march so much livelier with music than without that it ha

uted with or without music, at the option of the musician.) But the body is a clumsy piece of machinery, requiring some attention and observation to keep it accurately in time to the fiddling. The smallest diversion of the thought, the briefest relaxing

this really goes near to the root of the matter; albeit we might derive therefrom the unsupported inference that a poet "fat and scant of breath" would write in lines of a foot eac

hat our sense of things will be rhythmic. The brain being alternately stimulated and relaxed we must think-as we feel-in waves, apprehending nothing continuously, and incapable of a consciousness that is not divi

gère, la va

he bright,

e strong, and

ke wine of

he swiftly c

cease of ki

in the dr

ce and grac

a valse, la

ge Je