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: