Eternity! How know we but we stand
On the precipitous and crumbling verge
Of Time even now. Eternity below? [ Abraham Coles ]

The hoof, in its four-footed galloping, shakes the crumbling plain. [ An onomatopoetic line from Virgil ]

How absolute and omnipotent is the silence of night! And yet the stillness seems almost audible! From all the measureless depths of air around us comes a half-sound, a half-whisper, as if we could hear the crumbling and falling away of earth and all created things, in the great miracle of nature, decay and reproduction, ever beginning, never ending, - the gradual lapse and running of the sand in the great hour-glass of Time. [ Henry Wadsworth Longfellow ]