From Shakespeare’s Sonnets – no. XII – but found in William Hazlitt’s On the Pleasure of Hating – with what I’m finding to be Hazlitt’s typical looseness of precision in quoting. The beautiful origin aside, I marked this mainly for its closeness to ‘gutter of time’ – which I would not be against betting was another of Sterne’s intentionally warped echoes of Shakespeare
When I do count the clock that tells the time,
And see the brave day sunk in hideous night;
When I behold the violet past prime,
And sable curls, all silvered o’er with white;
When lofty trees I see barren of leaves,
Which erst from heat did canopy the herd,
And summer’s green all girded up in sheaves,
Borne on the bier with white and bristly beard,
Then of thy beauty do I question make,
That thou among the wastes of time must go,
Since sweets and beauties do themselves forsake
And die as fast as they see others grow;
And nothing ‘gainst Time’s scythe can make defence
Save breed, to brave him when he takes thee hence.
Extracts 