The hopes of the morrow, the dreams of the past.
Away in the distance is heard the vast sound.
From the streets of the city that compass it round,
Like the echo of fountains, or ocean's deep call;
Yet that fountain's low singing is heard over all.”
And yonder are the sun-dials, on which Lamb so sweetly moralizes—the inscriptions no longer half effaced, but bright with the gilding of 1872. “Pereunt et imputantur”; “Discite justitiam moniti”; “Vestigia [pg 108]nulla retrorsum”; and “Time and tide tarry for no man,” are some of the mottoes on them. It is rather a disappointment to find them looking so new and fresh, as if no longer “coeval with the time they measure.” There is something wonderfully poetical about a sun-dial, which derives its revelations of time's flight “immediately from heaven, holding correspondence with the fountain of light.” It has a kind of relationship to nature, and is, therefore, the very thing to have in gardens and groves and green fields “for sweet plants and flowers to spring up by, for the birds to apportion their silver warblings by, for flocks to pasture and be led to fold by.” It has a “heart-language” not heard from a clock, with “its solemn dulness of communication.” When we give up modern artificial life, and return to our primitive relationship with nature, we shall only measure the flight of time by a sun-dial, or an hour-glass, or the opening and shutting of flowers.
It is delightful wandering around the Temple gardens, with their shrubbery and flowers and fountains, and especially along the terrace overlooking the Thames. Here one naturally looks around for the old benchers of Lamb's time, half expecting to be greeted by the pensive gentility of Samuel Salt, or the quadrate person of Thomas Coventry, coming along with “step massy and elephantine, his face square as the lion's, his gait peremptory and path-keeping,” the terror of children, who flee before him as from an “Elisha bear.” One can also “fancy good Sir Roger de Coverley and Mr. Spectator, with his short face, pacing up and down the road, or dear Oliver Goldsmith in the summer-house, perhaps meditating about the next Citizen of the World, or the new suit that Mr. Filby, the tailor, is fashioning for him, or the dunning letter that Mr. Newbury has sent. Treading heavily on the gravel, and rolling majestically along in a snuff-colored suit and a wig that sadly wants the barber's powder and irons, one sees the great doctor, with Boswell behind him, a little the worse for the port-wine they have been taking at the Mitre, to ask Goldsmith to come home and take a dish of tea with Mrs. Williams.”
It is in the Temple gardens that Shakespeare makes York and Lancaster pluck the red and white roses which became the badges of their rival houses. It is here Plantagenet says:
“Let him that is a true-born gentleman,
And stands upon the honor of his birth,