They do their work in the days of peace […] and come to pay their symbol in a war or in a plague.

For time is a fleeting thing, and which appeareth as in a shadow, with the matter ever gliding, alwaies fluent, without ever being stable or permanent[…].

A second period, the graphosphere, runs from 1448 to around 1968: from the Gutenberg Revolution to the rise of TV.

It begins with Rother, whose running through the woods, in inisling Oxney, and such like, poetically here described is plain enough to any apprehending conceit […]