noon
Yet in the lowest deep there still yawns a lower deep ; and in the vast halls of man 's frailty , there are separate and more gloomy chambers of a frailty more exquisite and consummate . We account it frailty that threescore years and ten make the upshot of man 's pleasurable existence , and that , far before that time is reached , his beauty and his power have fallen among weeds and forgetfulness . But there is a frailty , by comparison with which this ordinary flux of the human race seems to have a vast duration . Cases there are , and those not rare , in which a single week , a day , an hour sweeps away all vestiges and landmarks of a memorable felicity ; in which the ruin travels faster than the flying showers upon the mountain-side , faster ` than a musician scatters sounds ; ' in which ` it was ' and ` it is not ' are words of the self-same tongue , in the self-same minute ; in which the sun that at noon beheld all sound and prosperous , long before its setting hour looks out upon a total wreck , and sometimes upon the total abolition of any fugitive memorial that there ever had been a vessel to be wrecked , or a wreck to be obliterated . These cases , though here spoken of rhetorically , are of daily occurrence ; and , though they may seem few by comparison with the infinite millions of the species , they are many indeed , if they be reckoned absolutely for themselves ; and throughout the limits of a whole nation , not a day passes over us but many families are robbed of their heads , or even swallowed up in ruin themselves , or their course turned out of the sunny beams into a dark wilderness . Shipwrecks and nightly conflagrations are sometimes , and especially among some nations , wholesale calamities ; battles yet more so ; earthquakes , the famine , the pestilence , though rarer , are visitations yet wider in their desolation . Sickness and commercial ill-luck , if narrower , are more frequent scourges .