_Horas non numero nisi serenas_--is the motto of a sun-dial near
Venice. There is a softness and a harmony in the words and in the
thought unparalleled. Of all conceits it is surely the most classical.
"I count only the hours that are serene." What a bland and
care-dispelling feeling! How the shadows seem to fade on the
dial-plate as the sky lours, and time presents only a blank unless as
its progress is marked by what is joyous, and all that is not happy
sinks into oblivion! What a fine lesson is conveyed to the mind--to
take no note of time but by its benefits, to watch only for the smiles
and neglect the frowns of fate, to compose our lives of bright and
gentle moments, turning always to the sunny side of things, and
letting the rest slip from our imaginations, unheeded or forgotten!
How different from the common art of self-tormenting! For myself, as I
rode along the Brenta, while the sun shone hot upon its sluggish,
slimy waves, my sensations were far from comfortable; but the reading
this inscription on the side of a glaring wall in an instant restored
me to myself; and still, whenever I think of or repeat it, it has the
power of wafting me into the region of pure and blissful abstraction.
I cannot help fancying it to be a legend of Popish superstition. Some
monk of the dark ages must have invented and bequeathed it to us, who,
loitering in trim gardens and watching the silent march of time, as
his fruits ripened in the sun or his flowers scented the balmy air,
felt a mild languor pervade his senses, and having little to do or to
care for, determined (in imitation of his sun-dial) to efface that
little from his thoughts or draw a veil over it, making of his life
one long dream of quiet! _Horas non numero nisi serenas_--he might
repeat, when the heavens were overcast and the gathering storm
scattered the falling leaves, and turn to his books and wrap himself
in his golden studies! Out of some mood of mind, indolent, elegant,
thoughtful, this exquisite device (speaking volumes) must have
originated.
Of the several modes of counting time, that by the sun-dial is perhaps
the most apposite and striking, if not the most convenient or
comprehensive. It does not obtrude its observations, though it "morals
on the time," and, by its stationary character, forms a contrast to
the most fleeting of all essences. It stands _sub dio_--under the
marble air, and there is some connexion between the image of infinity
and eternity. I should also like to have a sunflower growing near it
with bees fluttering round.[36] [Footnote 36: Is this a verbal
fallacy? Or in the close, retired, sheltered scene which I have
imagined to myself, is not the sun-flower a natural accompaniment of
the sun-dial?] It should be of iron to denote duration, and have a
dull, leaden look. I hate a sun-dial made of wood, which is rather
calculated to show the variations of the seasons, than the progress of
time, slow, silent, imperceptible, chequered with light and shade. If
our hours were all serene, we might probably take almost as little
note of them, as the dial does of those that are clouded. It is the
shadows thrown across, that gives us warning of their flight.
Otherwise our impressions would take the same undistinguishable hue;
we should scarce be conscious of our existence. Those who have had
none of the cares of this life to harass and disturb them, have been
obliged to have recourse to the hopes and fears of the next to enliven
the prospect before them. Most of the methods for measuring the lapse
of time have, I believe, been the contrivance of monks and religious
recluses, who, finding time hang heavy on their hands, were at some
pains to see how they got rid of it. The hour-glass is, I suspect, an
older invention; and it is certainly the most defective of all. Its
creeping sands are not indeed an unapt emblem of the minute, countless
portions of our existence; and the manner in which they gradually
slide through the hollow glass and diminish in number till not a
single one is left, also illustrates the way in which our years slip
from us by stealth: but as a mechanical invention, it is rather a
hindrance than a help, for it requires to have the time, of which it
pretends to count the precious moments, taken up in attention to
itself, and in seeing that when one end of the glass is empty, we turn
it round, in order that it may go on again, or else all our labour is
lost, and we must wait for some other mode of ascertaining the time
before we can recover our reckoning and proceed as before. The
philosopher in his cell, the cottager at her spinning-wheel must,
however, find an invaluable acquisition in this "companion of the
lonely hour," as it has been called,[37] which not only serves to tell
how the time goes, but to fill up its vacancies. What a treasure must
not the little box seem to hold, as if it were a sacred deposit of the
very grains and fleeting sands of life. What a business, in lieu of
other more important avocations, to see it out to the last sand, and
then to renew the process again on the instant, that there may not be
the least flaw or error in the account! What a strong sense must be
brought home to the mind of the value and irrecoverable nature of the
time that is fled; what a thrilling, incessant consciousness of the
slippery tenure by which we hold what remains of it! Our very
existence must seem crumbling to atoms, and running down (without a
miraculous reprieve) to the last fragment. "Dust to dust and ashes to
ashes" is a text that might be fairly inscribed on an hour-glass: it
is ordinarily associated with the scythe of Time and a Death's-head,
as a _Memento mori_; and has, no doubt, furnished many a tacit hint to
the apprehensive and visionary enthusiast in favour of a resurrection
to another life!
[Footnote 37:
"Once more, companion of the lonely hour,
I'll turn thee up again."
_Bloomfield's Poems--The Widow to her Hour-glass._]
The French give a different turn to things, less _sombre_ and less
edifying. A common and also a very pleasing ornament to a clock, in
Paris, is a figure of Time seated in a boat which Cupid is rowing
along, with the motto, _L'Amour fait passer le Tems_--which the wits
again have travestied into _Le Tems fait passer L'Amour_. All this is
ingenious and well; but it wants sentiment. I like a people who have
something that they love and something that they hate, and with whom
everything is not alike a matter of indifference or _pour passer le
tems_. The French attach no importance to anything, except for the
moment; they are only thinking how they shall get rid of one sensation
for another; all their ideas are _in transitu_. Every thing is
detached, nothing is accumulated. It would be a million of years
before a Frenchman would think of the _Horas non numero nisi serenas_.
Its impassioned repose and _ideal_ voluptuousness are as far from
their breasts as the poetry of that line in Shakspeare--"How sweet the
moonlight sleeps upon that bank!" They never arrive at the
classical--or the romantic. They blow the bubbles of vanity, fashion,
and pleasure; but they do not expand their perceptions into
refinement, or strengthen them into solidity. Where there is nothing
fine in the ground-work of the imagination, nothing fine in the
superstructure can be produced. They are light, airy, fanciful (to
give them their due)--but when they attempt to be serious (beyond mere
good sense) they are either dull or extravagant. When the volatile
salt has flown off, nothing but a _caput mortuum_ remains. They have
infinite crotchets and caprices with their clocks and watches, which
seem made for anything but to tell the hour--gold-repeaters, watches
with metal covers, clocks with hands to count the seconds. There is no
escaping from quackery and impertinence, even in our attempts to
calculate the waste of time. The years gallop fast enough for me,
without remarking every moment as it flies; and farther, I must say I
dislike a watch (whether of French or English manufacture) that comes
to me like a footpad with its face muffled, and does not present its
clear, open aspect like a friend, and point with its finger to the
time of day. All this opening and shutting of dull, heavy cases (under
pretence that the glass-lid is liable to be broken, or lets in the
dust or air and obstructs the movement of the watch), is not to
husband time, but to give trouble. It is mere pomposity and
self-importance, like consulting a mysterious oracle that one carries
about with one in one's pocket, instead of asking a common question of
an acquaintance or companion. There are two clocks which strike the
hour in the room where I am. This I do not like. In the first place, I
do not want to be reminded twice how the time goes (it is like the
second tap of a saucy servant at your door when perhaps you have no
wish to get up): in the next place, it is starting a difference of
opinion on the subject, and I am averse to every appearance of
wrangling and disputation. Time moves on the same, whatever disparity
there may be in our mode of keeping count of it, like true fame in
spite of the cavils and contradictions of the critics. I am no friend
to repeating watches. The only pleasant association I have with them
is the account given by Rousseau of some French lady, who sat up
reading the _New Heloise_ when it first came out, and ordering her
maid to sound the repeater, found it was too late to go to bed, and
continued reading on till morning. Yet how different is the interest
excited by this story from the account which Rousseau somewhere else
gives of his sitting up with his father reading romances, when a boy,
till they were startled by the swallows twittering in their nests at
day-break, and the father cried out, half angry and ashamed--"_Allons,
mons fils; je suis plus enfant que toi!_" In general, I have heard
repeating watches sounded in stage-coaches at night, when some
fellow-traveller suddenly awaking and wondering what was the hour,
another has very deliberately taken out his watch, and pressing the
spring, it has counted out the time; each petty stroke acting like a
sharp puncture on the ear, and informing me of the dreary hours I had
already passed, and of the more dreary ones I had to wait till
morning.
The great advantage, it is true, which clocks have over watches and
other dumb reckoners of time is, that for the most part they strike
the hour--that they are as it were the mouth-pieces of time; that they
not only point it to the eye, but impress it on the ear; that they
"lend it both an understanding and a tongue." Time thus speaks to us
in an audible and warning voice. Objects of sight are easily
distinguished by the sense, and suggest useful reflections to the
mind; sounds, from their intermittent nature, and perhaps other
causes, appeal more to the imagination, and strike upon the heart. But
to do this, they must be unexpected and involuntary--there must be no
trick in the case--they should not be squeezed out with a finger and a
thumb; there should be nothing optional, personal in their occurrence;
they should be like stern, inflexible monitors, that nothing can
prevent from discharging their duty. Surely, if there is anything with
which we should not mix up our vanity and self-consequence, it is with
Time, the most independent of all things. All the sublimity, all the
superstition that hang upon this palpable mode of announcing its
flight, are chiefly attached to this circumstance. Time would lose its
abstracted character, if we kept it like a curiosity or a
jack-in-a-box: its prophetic warnings would have no effect, if it
obviously spoke only at our prompting, like a paltry ventriloquism.
The clock that tells the coming, dreaded hour--the castle bell, that
"with its brazen throat and iron tongue, sounds one unto the drowsy
ear of night"--the curfew, "swinging slow with sullen roar" o'er
wizard stream or fountain, are like a voice from other worlds, big
with unknown events. The last sound, which is still kept up as an old
custom in many parts of England, is a great favourite with me. I used
to hear it when a boy. It tells a tale of other times. The days that
are past, the generations that are gone, the tangled forest glades and
hamlets brown of my native country, the woodsman's art, the Norman
warrior armed for the battle or in his festive hall, the conqueror's
iron rule and peasant's lamp extinguished, all start up at the
clamorous peal, and fill my mind with fear and wonder. I confess,
nothing at present interests me but what has been--the recollection of
the impressions of my early life, or events long past, of which only
the dim traces remain in a smouldering ruin or half-obsolete custom.
That _things should be that are now no more_, creates in my mind the
most unfeigned astonishment. I cannot solve the mystery of the past,
nor exhaust my pleasure in it. The years, the generations to come, are
nothing to me. We care no more about the world in the year 2300 than
we do about one of the planets. Even George IV is better than the Earl
of Windsor. We might as well make a voyage to the moon as think of
stealing a march upon Time with impunity. _De non apparentibus et non
existentibus eadem est ratio._ Those who are to come after us and push
us from the stage seem like upstarts and pretenders, that may be said
to exist _in vacuo_, we know not upon what, except as they are blown
up with vain and self conceit by their patrons among the moderns. But
the ancients are true and _bona-fide_ people, to whom we are bound by
aggregate knowledge and filial ties, and in whom seen by the mellow
light of history we feel our own existence doubled and our pride
consoled, as we ruminate on the vestiges of the past. The public in
general, however, do not carry this speculative indifference about the
future to what is to happen to themselves, or to the part they are to
act in the busy scene. For my own part, I do; and the only wish I can
form, or that ever prompts the passing sigh, would be to live some of
my years over again--they would be those in which I enjoyed and
suffered most!
The ticking of a clock in the night has nothing very interesting nor
very alarming in it, though superstition has magnified it into an
omen. In a state of vigilance or debility, it preys upon the spirits
like the persecution of a teazing pertinacious insect; and haunting
the imagination after it has ceased in reality, is converted into a
death-watch. Time is rendered vast by contemplating its minute
portions thus repeatedly and painfully urged upon its attention, as
the ocean in its immensity is composed of water-drops. A clock
striking with a clear and silver sound is a great relief in such
circumstances, breaks the spell, and resembles a sylph-like and
friendly spirit in the room. Foreigners, with all their tricks and
contrivances upon clocks and time-pieces, are strangers to the sound
of village-bells, though perhaps a people that can dance may dispense
with them. They impart a pensive, wayward pleasure to the mind, and
are a kind of chronology of happy events, often serious in the
retrospect--births, marriages, and so forth. Coleridge calls them "the
poor man's only music." A village-spire in England peeping from its
cluster of trees is always associated in imagination with this
cheerful accompaniment, and may be expected to pour its joyous tidings
on the gale. In Catholic countries, you are stunned with the
everlasting tolling of bells to prayers or for the dead. In the
Apennines, and other wild and mountainous districts of Italy, the
little chapel-bell with its simple tinkling sound has a romantic and
charming effect. The Monks in former times appear to have taken a
pride in the construction of bells as well as churches; and some of
those of the great cathedrals abroad (as at Cologne and Rouen) may be
fairly said to be hoarse with counting the flight of ages. The chimes
in Holland are a nuisance. They dance in the hours and the quarters.
They leave no respite to the imagination. Before one set has done
ringing in your ears, another begins. You do not know whether the
hours move or stand still, go backwards or forwards, so fantastical
and perplexing are their accompaniments. Time is a more staid
personage, and not so full of gambols. It puts you in mind of a tune
with variations, or of an embroidered dress. Surely, nothing is more
simple than time. His march is straightforward; but we should have
leisure allowed us to look back upon the distance we have come, and
not be counting his steps every moment. Time in Holland is a foolish
old fellow with all the antics of a youth, who "goes to church in a
coranto, and lights his pipe in a cinque-pace." The chimes with us, on
the contrary, as they come in every three or four hours, are like
stages in the journey of the day. They give a fillip to the lazy,
creeping hours, and relieve the lassitude of country-places. At noon,
their desultory, trivial song is diffused through the hamlet with the
odour of rashers of bacon; at the close of day they send the toil-worn
sleepers to their beds. Their discontinuance would be a great loss to
the thinking or unthinking public. Mr. Wordsworth has painted their
effect on the mind when he makes his friend Matthew, in a fit of
inspired dotage,
"Sing those witty rhymes
About the crazy old church-clock
And the bewilder'd chimes."
The tolling of the bell for deaths and executions is a fearful
summons, though, as it announces, not the advance of time but the
approach of fate, it happily makes no part of our subject. Otherwise,
the "sound of the bell" for Macheath's execution in the "Beggar's
Opera," or for that of the Conspirators in "Venice Preserved," with
the roll of the drum at a soldier's funeral, and a digression to that
of my Uncle Toby, as it is so finely described by Sterne, would
furnish ample topics to descant upon. If I were a moralist, I might
disapprove the ringing in the new and ringing out the old year.
'Why dance ye, mortals, o'er the grave of Time?'
St. Paul's bell tolls only for the death of our English kings, or a
distinguished personage or two, with long intervals between.[38]
[Footnote 38: Rousseau has admirably described the effect of bells on
the imagination in a passage in the Confessions, beginning "_Le son
des cloches m'a toujours singulierement affecte_," &c.]
Those who have no artificial means of ascertaining the progress of
time, are in general the most acute in discerning its immediate signs,
and are most retentive of individual dates. The mechanical aids to
knowledge are not sharpeners of the wits. The understanding of a
savage is a kind of natural almanac, and more true in its
prognostication of the future. In his mind's eye he sees what has
happened or what is likely to happen to him, "as in a map the voyager
his course." Those who read the times and seasons in the aspect of the
heavens and the configurations of the stars, who count by moons and
know when the sun rises and sets, are by no means ignorant of their
own affairs or of the common concatenation of events. People in such
situations have not their faculties distracted by any multiplicity of
inquiries beyond what befalls themselves, and the outward appearances
that mark the change. There is, therefore, a simplicity and clearness
in the knowledge they possess, which often puzzles the more learned. I
am sometimes surprised at a shepherd-boy by the roadside, who sees
nothing but the earth and sky, asking me the time of day--he ought to
know so much better than any one how far the sun is above the horizon.
I suppose he wants to ask a question of a passenger, or to see if he
has a watch. Robinson Crusoe lost his reckoning in the monotony of his
life and that bewildering dream of solitude, and was fain to have
recourse to the notches in a piece of wood. What a diary was his! And
how time must have spread its circuit round him, vast and pathless as
the ocean!
For myself, I have never had a watch nor any other mode of keeping
time in my possession, nor ever wish to learn how time goes. It is a
sign I have had little to do, few avocations, few engagements. When I
am in a town, I can hear the clock; and when I am in the country, I
can listen to the silence. What I like best is to lie whole mornings
on a sunny bank on Salisbury Plain, without any object before me,
neither knowing nor caring how time passes, and thus "with
light-winged toys of feathered Idleness" to melt down hours to
moments. Perhaps some such thoughts as I have here set down float
before me like motes before my half-shut eyes, or some vivid image of
the past by forcible contrast rushes by me--"Diana and her fawn, and
all the glories of the antique world;" then I start away to prevent
the iron from entering my soul, and let fall some tears into that
stream of time which separates me farther and farther from all I once
loved! At length I rouse myself from my reverie, and home to dinner,
proud of killing time with thought, nay even without thinking.
Somewhat of this idle humour I inherit from my father, though he had
not the same freedom from _ennui_, for he was not a metaphysician; and
there were stops and vacant intervals in his being which he did not
know how to fill up. He used in these cases, and as an obvious
resource, carefully to wind up his watch at night, and "with
lack-lustre eye" more than once in the course of the day look to see
what o'clock it was. Yet he had nothing else in his character in
common with the elder Mr. Shandy. Were I to attempt a sketch of him,
for my own or the reader's satisfaction, it would be after the
following manner:----but now I recollect, I have done something of the
kind once before, and were I to resume the subject here, some bat or
owl of a critic, with spectacled gravity, might swear I had stolen the
whole of this Essay from myself--or (what is worse) from him! So I had
better let it go as it is.
_Hazlitt._