A Thousand Ages In Thy Sight

A thousand ages in thy sight
Are like an evening gone;
Short as the watch that ends the night
Before the rising sun.

This quote opens the Shadow of the Torturer, the first volume of the Book of the New Sun. It is from the Isaac Watts's poem O God, Our Help In Ages Past, a paraphrase of Psalm 90. It was first published in 1719 in The Psalms of David Imitated in the Language of the New Testament.

Editor: This poem quickly became a hymn, sung to the William Croft melody, St. Anne. Also, another stanza seems to bear the themes of the Sun Cycle:

Time like an ever-rolling stream
Bears all its sons away;
They fly forgotten as a dream
Dies at the opening day.

-