For tho’ we sleep, or wake, or rome, or ride,
Ay fleeth the time, it will no man abide,
and Spenser’s—
Make hast, therefore, sweet Love, whilst it is prime,
For none can call again the passèd time,
are as fine as any of the allusions by the classic poets who have
festooned and intertwined the passing hour with rosebuds and asphodels.
I find the Book of Sun-Dials a delightful volume to take up when in a
meditative mood. It needs, withal, a still room and a still hour to be
read in, an environing quietness like the whisper of the gnomon itself.
Then rambling through the pages, the present becomes absorbed by the
past as you muse over the icons of the dials and moralize upon the
quaint inscriptions. Transcribed in large Italic type, the mottoes stand
out with the vividness of an epitaph graven upon a tomb, voices from
posterity preaching from the perennial text:
As Time And Houres Passeth Awaye
So Doeth The Life Of Man Decaye.
Often as you contemplate the time-posts and their _intaglios_ do they
absorb the attention afresh, casting new shades of meaning from the
sentient styles. They transport you into gardens where old-fashioned
flowers and historic yew-trees grow, they conduct you through old
churchyards among neglected graves, they deliver their homilies from
weather-beaten walls, and their pathos appeals from many an ancient
sanctuary and moss-grown lintel. How noiselessly, how serenely they mark
the flight of time! It is Time itself inaudibly counting the hours; the
day suavely balancing its silent periods. They mirror primitive time,
removed from the present turmoil, when the sun was the pendulum and the
shadow the index-hand. Associated with Nature by ties the most
endearing, by the golden sunshine, the murmuring breeze, and the songs
of birds, the dial becomes, as it were, a reflective facet of external
Nature in her gracious moods, its very shadow representing sunlight, the
sunlight absent where the shadow is not. The sun-dial has molded itself
to grace, and with rare exceptions its mottoes are happily chosen,
attesting hours of meditation in forming an epigram or shaping a poetic
fancy to blend with the shifting shadow. Certainly many of the
sentiments collated in the monograph referred to are of more than
passing interest. Their pathos and their quaintness set one dreaming.
Among the many inscriptions which arrested me while first turning the
leaves, a few may be appended without, I trust, fatiguing the reader.
Let her or him moralize a moment, and consider life from the standpoint
of the dial, now grave, now gay; now lively, now severe. Though Time
hurries mankind it has apparently not hurried the dials in choosing
their inscriptions. It is rather a case of _festina lente_ than _hora
fugit_. Some are as terse as an epigram of Martial or a proverb from
Job; others sweet as a hymn of Watts or a stanza from The Temple. Thus,
light and shadow are felicitously blended in the tale a dial tells on a
house at Wadsley, near Sheffield, the moralist preaching from a niche in
the wall:
Of Shade And Sunshine For Each Hour
See Here A Measure Made:
Then Wonder Not If Life Consist
Of Sunshine And Of Shade.
I Mark The Moments Trod For
Good Or Ill
has been the burden of the vertical dial at the priory, Warwick, since
1556.
Lifes But A Shadow
Mans But Dust
This Dyall Sayes
Dy All We Must
says the dial on the Church of All Saints, Winkleigh, Devon.
I Am A Shadow, So Art Thou
I Mark Time, Dost Thou?
is inscribed on an old horologium in the Grey Friars’ churchyard,
Sterling.
Sweetly fragrant are the lines incised on the four sides of a stone dial
in a flower-garden at South Windleham:
I Stand Amid Ye Summere Flowers
To Tell Ye Passage Of Ye Houres.
When Winter Steals Ye Flowers Awaye
I Tell Ye Passinge Of Their Daye.
O Man Whose Flesh Is But As Grasse
Like Summere Floweres Thy Life Shall Passe.
Whiles Tyme Is Thine Laye Up In Store
And Thou Shalt Live For Ever More.
Pretty, also, are the lines by James Montgomery beneath a vertical dial
in Burneston, Yorkshire:
Time From The Church Tower Cries To You And Me,
Upon This Moment Hangs Eternity:
The Dial’s Index And The Belfry’s Chime
To Eye And Ear Confirm This Truth Of Time.
Prepare To Meet It; Death Will Not Delay;
Take Then Thy Saviour’s Warning—Watch And Pray!
One of the mottoes has an echo of Sidney:
Time As He Passes Us Has A Dove’s Wing
Unsoiled And Swift, And Of A Silken Sound.
“The Night Cometh” is neatly amplified upon a plate that supports a
cross sun-dial on a stone pedestal upon the terrace of the hospital of
St. Cross, Rugby:
The Passing Shadows Which The Sunbeams Throw
Athwart This Cross, Time’s Hastening Foot-Steps Show;
Warned By Their Teaching Work Ere Day Be O’er,
Soon Comes The Night When Man Can Work No More.
One motto reads Unam Time (Fear one hour); another, Unam Timeo (One hour
I fear). Two others read, Heu Quærimus Umbram, Heu Patimus Umbram (Alas!
we pursue a shadow), (Alas! we endure the shadow). Eheu Fugaces is
marked upon a Yorkshire plate, and Labuntur Anni on Burnham Church,
Somerset. The shortest mottoes are Redeme, J’avance, Remember,
Irrevocabile. A beautiful stone sun-dial still casts its shadow in the
old garden of Gilbert White, and is figured in Macmillan’s edition of
the Natural History of Selborne. This is not mentioned in Mrs. Gatty’s
comprehensive work, and I can not determine from the illustration
whether it bears a motto. Each To His Task, taken from White’s
Invitation would be an appropriate inscription.
One of the quaintest inscriptions mentioned in the Book of Sun-Dials is
that which looks from the wall of a church at Argentière, near Vallouse.
It was scarcely composed in an hour, and loses much in the translation:
Cette Montre Par Son Ombre Montre
Que Comme L’Ombre Passent Nos Jours.
(This marker marks by its shadow that our days pass away like a shadow).
There is much of moral coloring in these two lines:
Haste Traveller, The Sun Is Sinking Low
He Shall Return Again, But Never Thou.
And is this not altogether lovely?
Give God Thy Heart, Thy Hopes, Thy Gifts, Thy Gold,
The Day Wears On, The Times Are Waxing Old.
And so one might go on quoting the old moral, shadowed by different
texts. Perhaps Sterne expresses it as pithily as any epigrammatist,
“life” being but another term for time: “What is the life of man! Is it
not to shift from side to side? from sorrow to sorrow? to button up one
cause of vexation, and unbutton another?” But Sterne deals with the
shadow only, while the gnomon of the dial presents its side of sunshine
equally with its side of shade, however somber the tone of the
inscription. Doubtless Nature preaches more truly than man. Life is not
all composed of shadow, nor all of sunshine; and if we but cultivate the
spirit of contentment, possibly we have solved its sternest problem.
But may contentment, after all, be had for the striving? “Whatever it be
that falleth into our knowledge and jouissance,” reasons Montaigne in
the fifty-third chapter of the First Book, “we finde it doth not
satisfie us, and we still follow and gape after future, uncertaine, and
unknowne things, because the present and knowne please us not, and doe
not satisfie us. Not (as I thinke) because they have not sufficiently
wherewith to satiate and please us, but the reason is, that we apprehend
and seize on them with an unruly, disordered, and a diseased taste and
hold-fast.” And, again, in the twelfth chapter of the Second Book: “All
of the Philosophers of all the sects that ever were doe generally agree
on this point, that the chiefest felicitie, or _summum bonum_,
consisteth in the peace and tranquillitie of the soul and bodie:—but
where shall we find it?”
Somewhere, slumbering upon the shelves, there exists a golden book of a
former century, written by a learned French philosopher-pantologist,
entitled L’Art de se rendre heureux par les Songes (The Art of rendering
one’s self happy by Dreams). A unique volume and the labor of a
lifetime, its present owner and the fortunate possessor of the secret
has never been discovered; and, alas! a reprint does not exist.
Contentment—is this but another name for Illusion?—is a bird of passage
who, soaring high in the empyrean, must be secured on the wing.
Numberless those who would ensnare him, and innumerable the lures set to
turn his evasive pinion. But he flies not in flocks; and, dimly outlined
against the distant sky, he is ever flitting onward, far out of range.
Some one, farther on, who seeks him not, perchance looks serenely
upward, and unconsciously charms him down....
My fair and gracious reader, is it you?
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