Читать книгу Things to be Remembered in Daily Life - John Timbs - Страница 10
SUN-DIALS.
ОглавлениеSun-dials are little regarded but as curiosities in these days; although the science of constructing Sun-dials, under the name of Gnomonics, was, up to a comparatively recent period, part of a mathematical course. As long as watches were scarce, and clocks not very common, the dial was an actual time-keeper. Of the mathematical works of the seventeenth century which are found on book-stalls, none are so common as those on Dialling.
Each of the old dials usually had its monitory inscription; and although the former have mostly disappeared, the mottoes have been preserved, so that all their good is not lost.
The stately city of Oxford, which Waagen declared it was worth a special journey from Germany to see, has, upon its churches and colleges, and in their lovely gardens, several dials. Christopher Wren, when a boy of fifteen at Wadham College, designed on the ceiling of a room a reflecting dial, embellished with various devices and two figures, Astronomy and Geometry, with accessories, tastefully drawn with a pen, and bearing a Latin inscription; but his more elaborate work is the large and costly dial which he erected at All Souls’ College, of which he was a Fellow.
The Rev. W. Lisle Bowles was a sincere respecter of dials. In the garden of his parsonage at Bremhill he placed a Sun-dial—a small antique twisted column, gray with age, and believed to have been the dial of the abbot of Malmesbury, and counted his hours at the adjoining lodge; for it was taken from the garden of the farmhouse, which had originally been the summer retirement of this mitred lord: it is of monastic character, but a more ornate capital has been added, which bears the date of 1688; it has the following inscription by the venerable Canon:
To count the brief and unreturning hours,
This Sun-dial was placed among the flowers,
Which came forth in their beauty—smiled and died,
Blooming and withering round its ancient side.
Mortal, thy day is passing—see that Flower,
And think upon the Shadow and the Hour.
From beneath a venerable yew, which has seen the persecution of the loyal English clergy, you look into the adjoining churchyard of Bremhill, on an old Sun-dial, once a cross. Bowles tells us: “The cross was found broken at its foot, probably by the country iconoclasts of the day. I have brought the interesting fragment again into light, and placed it conspicuously opposite to an old Scotch fir in the churchyard, which I think it not unlikely was planted by Townson on his restoration. The accumulation of the soil of centuries had covered an ascent of four steps at the bottom of this record of silent hours. These steps have been worn in places, from the act of frequent prostration or kneeling by the forefathers of the hamlet, perhaps before the church existed.” Upon this old dial Bowles wrote one of his most touching poems, of which these are the opening verses:
So passes silent o’er the dead thy shade,
Brief Time! and hour by hour, and day by day,
The pleasing pictures of the present fade,
And like a summer-vapour steal away.
And have not they, who here forgotten lie
(Say, hoary chronicler of ages past),
Once more the shadow with delighted eye,
Nor thought it fled,—how certain and how fast?
Since thou hast stood, and thus thy vigil kept,
Noting each hour, o’er mould’ring stones beneath,
The Pastor and his flock alike have slept,
And “dust to dust” proclaim’d the stride of death.
Any thing that reminds us of the lapse of time should remind us also of the right employment of time in doing whatever business is required to be done.
A similar lesson is solemnly conveyed in the Scripture motto to a Sun-dial: “The night cometh, when no man can work.” Another solemn injunction is conveyed in the motto to a Sun-dial erected by Bishop Copleston in a village near which he resided: “Let not the sun go down upon your wrath” (Ephesians iv. 26).
A more subtle motto is, “Septem sine horis;” signifying that there are in the longest day seven hours (and a trifle over) during which the Sun-dial is useless.
Upon the public buildings and in the pleasure-grounds of Old London the Sun-dial was placed as a silent monitor to those who were sailing on the busy stream of time through its crowded haunts and thoroughfares, or seeking meditation in quiet nooks and plaisances of its river mansions and garden-houses. Upon churches the dial commonly preceded the clock: Wren especially introduced the dial in his churches.
Sovereigns and statesmen may have reflected beside the palace-dials upon the fleetingness of life, and thus have learned to take better note of time. Whitehall was famous for its Sun-dials. In Privy Garden was a dial set up by Edward Gunter, professor of astronomy at Gresham College (and of which he published a description), by command of James I., in 1624. A large stone pedestal bore four dials at the four corners, and “the great horizontal concave” in the centre; besides east, west, north, and south dials at the sides. In the reign of Charles II. this dial was defaced by an intoxicated nobleman of the Court; upon which Marvell wrote:
This place for a dial was too unsecure,
Since a guard and a garden could not defend;
For so near to the Court they will never endure
Any witness to show how their time they misspend.
In the court-yard facing the Banqueting-house was another curious dial, set up in 1669 by order of Charles II. It was invented by one Francis Hall, alias Lyne, a Jesuit, and professor of mathematics at Liège. This dial consisted of five stages rising in a pyramidal form, and bearing several vertical and reclining dials, globes cut into planes, and glass bowls; showing, “besides the houres of all kinds,” “many things also belonging to geography, astrology, and astronomy, by the sun’s shadow made visible to the eye.” Among the pictures were portraits of the king, the two queens, the Duke of York, and Prince Rupert. Father Lyne published a description of this dial, which consists of seventy-three parts: it is illustrated with seventeen plates: the details are condensed in No. 400 of the Mirror. About 1710, William Allingham, a mathematician in Canon-row, asked 500l. to repair this dial: it was last seen by Vertue, the artist and antiquary, at Buckingham House.
The bricky towers of St. James’s palace had their Sun-dials; and in the gardens of Kensington palace and Hampton Court palace are to this day superb dials.
Upon a house-front in the Terrace, New Palace Yard, Westminster, is a Sun-dial, having the motto from Virgil, “Discite justitiam, moniti,” which had probably been inscribed upon the old clock-tower of the palace, in reference to its having been built with a fine that had been levied on the Chief Justice of the King’s Bench for altering a record.
The Inns of Court, where time runs its golden sand, have retained a few of their Sun-dials. In Lincoln’s Inn, on two of the old gables, are: 1. A southern dial, restored in 1840, which shows the hours by its gnomon, from 6 A.M. to 4 P.M., and is inscribed, “Ex hoc monumento pendet æternitas.” 2. A western dial, restored in 1794 and 1848, from the different situation of its plane, only shows the hours from noon till night: inscription, “Quam redit nescitis horam.” And in Serle’s-court (now New-square), on the west side, was a dial inscribed, “Publica privatis secernite, sacra prophanis.”
Gray’s Inn has lost its Sun-dials: but in the gardens was a dial, opposite Verulam Buildings, not far from Bacon’s summer-house; and the turret of the great Hall had formerly a southern declining dial, with this motto, “Lux diei, lex Dei.”
Furnival’s Inn had its garden and dial, which disappeared when the old Inn buildings were taken down in 1818, and the Inn rebuilt.
Staple Inn had upon its Hall a well-kept dial, above a luxuriant fig-tree.
Clement’s Inn had, in its small garden, a kneeling figure supporting a dial,—one of the leaden garden embellishments common in the last century. In New Inn, adjoining, the Hall has a large vertical Sun-dial, motto: “Time and Tide tarry for no man.”
Lyon’s Inn, which had been an Inn “since 1420, or sooner,” had, in 1828, an old Sun-dial, which had lost its gnomon and most of its figures.
The Temple garden, Inner and Middle, has each a large pillar Sun-dial; the latter very handsome. There are vertical dials in various courts; but the old dial of Inner Temple terrace, with its “Begone about your business,”—in reality the reply of a testy bencher to the painter who teased him for an inscription,—disappeared in the year 1828. There remain three dials with mottoes: Temple-lane, “Pereunt et imputantur;” Essex-court, “Vestigia nulla retrorsum;” Brick-court, “Time and tide tarry for no man;” and in Pump-court and Garden-court are two dials without mottoes. Charles Lamb has this charmingly reflective passage, suggested by the Temple dials:
What an antique air had the now almost effaced sun-dials, with their moral inscriptions, seeming coevals with that Time which they measured, and to take their revelations of its flight immediately from heaven, holding correspondence with the fountain of light! How could the dark line steal imperceptibly on, watched by the eye of childhood, eager to detect its movement, never catched, nice as an evanescent cloud, or the first arrests of sleep!
And yet doth beauty like a dial-hand
Steal from his figure, and no pace perceived!
What a dead thing is a clock, with its ponderous embowelments of lead and brass, its pert or solemn dulness of communication, compared with the simple altar-like structure and silent heart-language of the old dial! It stood as the garden god of Christian gardens. Why is it almost every where vanished? If its business be superseded by more elaborate inventions, its moral uses, its beauty, might have pleaded for its continuance. It spoke of moderate labours, of pleasures not protracted after sunset, of temperance and good hours. It was the primitive clock, the horologe of the first world. Adam could scarce have missed it in Paradise. It was the measure appropriate for sweet plants and flowers to spring by, for the birds to apportion their silver warblings by, for flocks to pasture and be led to fold by. The shepherd ‘carved it out quaintly in the sun,’ and, turning philosopher by the very occupation, provided it with mottoes more touching than tombstones. It was a pretty device of the gardener, recorded by Marvell, who, in the days of artificial gardening, made a dial out of herbs and flowers:
How well the skilful gardener drew,
Of herbs and flowers, this dial new!
Where from above, the milder sun
Does through a fragrant zodiac run:
And, as it works, the industrious bee
Computes its time as well as we.
How could such sweet and wholesome hours
Be reckon’d, but with herbs and flowers?
From “The Garden.”
Another noted dial gave name to a locality of the metropolis, which has known many mutations, viz. Seven Dials, built in the time of Charles II. for wealthy tenants. Evelyn notes, 1694: “I went to see the building near St. Giles’s, where Seven Dials make a star from a Doric pillar placed in the middle of a circular area, said to be by Mr. Neale (the introducer of the late lotteries), in imitation of Venice, now set up here for himself twice, and once for the state.”
Where famed St. Giles’s ancient limits spread,
An in-rail’d column rears its lofty head:
Here to seven streets seven dials count their day,
And from each other catch the circling ray:
Here oft the peasant, with inquiring face,
Bewilder’d trudges on from place to place;
He dwells on every sign with stupid gaze,
Enters the narrow alleys’ doubtful maze,
Tries every winding court and street in vain,
And doubles o’er his weary steps again.
Gay’s Trivia, book ii.
The seven streets were Great and Little Earl, Great and Little White Lion, Great and Little St. Andrew’s, and Queen; though the dial-stone had but six faces, two of the streets opening into one angle. The column and dials were removed in June 1773, to search for a treasure said to be concealed beneath the base. They were never replaced; but in 1822 were purchased of a stone-mason, and the column was surmounted with a ducal coronet, and set up on Weybridge Green as a memorial to the late Duchess of York, who died at Oatlands in 1820. The dial-stone is now a stepping-stone at the adjoining Ship inn.[8]
The Sun-dial was also formerly used with a compass. The Hon. Robert Boyle relates, “that a Boatman one day took out of his pocket a little Sun-dial, furnished with an excited needle to direct how to set it, such dials being used among mariners, not only to show them the hour of the day, but to inform them from what quarter the wind blows.”
A Cape Town Correspondent of Notes and Queries describes a Sun-dial and compass in his possession, made by “Johann Willebrand, in Augsburg, 1848:” it has a curious perpetual calendar attached, and is of highly finished work in silver, parcel-gilt. Another Sun-dial and compass is mentioned as made by Butterfield, at Paris: it is small, of silver, and horizontal; upon its face are engraved dials for several latitudes, and at the back a table of principal cities; it is set by a compass, and the gnomon adjusted by a divided arc. The N. point of the compass-box is fixed in a position to allow for variation, probably at Paris; and, judging from this, it would appear to have been made about 1716.[9]
We should also notice the pocket ring-dial, such as that which gave occasion to the Fool in the Forest of Arden to “moral on the time:”
And then he drew a dial from his poke,
And, looking on it with lack-lustre eye,
Says, very wisely, “It is ten o’clock.”
This is a ring of brass, much like a miniature dog-collar, and has, moving in a groove in its circumference, a narrower ring with a boss, pierced by a small hole to admit a ray of light. The latter ring is made movable, to allow for the varying declination of the sun in the several months of the year, and the initials of these are marked in the ascending and descending scale on the larger ring, which bears also the motto:
Set me right, and use me well,
And I ye time to you will tell.
The hours are lined and numbered on the opposite concavity. When the boss of the sliding ring is set, and the ring is suspended by the ring directly towards the sun, a ray of light passing through the hole in the boss impinges on the concave surface, and the hour is told with fair accuracy. Mr. Thomas Q. Couch, of Bodmin, thus describes this Dial in Notes and Queries, 3d series, No. 36. Mr. Charles Knight, in his Pictorial Shakspeare, has engraved a dial of this kind, as an illustration of As you like it.
Mr. Redmond, of Liverpool, describes the old pocket ring-dial as common in the county of Wexford some twenty-five years ago: there was hardly a farm-house where one could not be had. The same Correspondent of Notes and Queries, 3d series, No. 39, describes a door-sill marked with the hour for every day in the year: the sill had a full southern aspect, so that when the sun shone, the time could be read as correctly as by any watch.
Another Correspondent of Notes and Queries, 2d series, No. 38, has an ingenious pocket-dial, sold by one T. Clarke: it is merely a card, with a small plummet hanging by a thread, and a gnomon, which lies flat on the card, but, when lifted up, casts the shadow to indicate the hour of the day, and also the hours of sunrise and sunset.
In the United Service Museum, Whitehall, is a Sun-dial, with a burning-glass arranged to fire a small gun at noon; also a large Universal Dial, with a circle showing minutes; and another large Universal Dial, with horizontal plate and spirit-level.
Suppose we collect a few of the monitory inscriptions on dials in various places. Hazlitt, in a graceful paper “On a Sun-dial,” tells us that
Horas non numero nisi serenas
is the motto of a Sun-dial near Venice; and the same line is painted in huge letters over the Sun-dial in front of an old farmhouse near Farnworth, in Lancashire.
At Hebden Bridge, in Yorkshire, is this quaint motto:
Quod petis, umbra est.
Canon Bowles, in his love of the solemn subject, prescribed the following, with paraphrastic translations:
Morning Sun.—Tempus volat.
Oh! early passenger, look up—be wise,
And think how, night and day, time onward flies.
Noon.—Dum tempus habemus, operemur bonum.
Life steals away—this hour, oh! man, is lent thee.
Patient to work the work of Him who sent thee.
Setting Sun.—Redibo, tu nunquam.
Haste, traveller, the sun is sinking now:
He shall return again, but never thou.
Over the Sun-dial on an old house in Rye:
Tempus edax rerum.[10]
Underneath it:
That solar shadow,
As it measures life, it life resembles too.
In Brading churchyard, Isle of Wight, on a Sun-dial fixed to what appears originally to have been part of a churchyard cross, is the motto:
Hora pars vitæ.
Near the porch of Milton church, Berks, is:
Our Life’s a flying Shadow; God’s the Pole,
Death, the Horizon, where our sun is set;
The Index, pointing at him, is our Soul,
Which will, through Christ, a Resurrection get.
Butler has this couplet:
True as the dial to the sun,
Although it be not shin’d upon.
Hudibras, part iii. canto 2.
Upon this Dr. Nash notes: “As the dial is invariable, and always open to the sun whenever its rays can show the time of day, though the weather is often cloudy, and obscures its lustre: so true loyalty is always ready to serve its king and country, though it often suffers great afflictions and distresses.”
There cannot be a more faithful indicator, according to Barton Booth’s song:
True as the needle to the pole,
Or as the dial to the sun.
After all, the sun-dial is but an occasional timekeeper; a defect which the pious Bishop Hall ingeniously illustrates in the following beautiful Meditation “On the Sight of a Dial:” “If the sun did not shine upon this dial, nobody would look at it: in a cloudy day it stands like an useless post, unheeded, unregarded; but, when once those beams break forth, every passenger runs to it, and gazes on it.
“O God, while thou hidest thy countenance from me, methinks all thy creatures pass by me with a willing neglect. Indeed, what am I without thee? And if thou have drawn in me some lines and notes of able endowments; yet, if I be not actuated by thy grace, all is, in respect of use, no better than nothing; but when thou renewest the light of thy loving countenance upon me, I find a sensible and happy change of condition: methinks all things look upon me with such cheer and observance, as if they meant to make good that word of thine, Those that honour me, I will honour: now, every line and figure, which it hath pleased thee to work in me, serve for useful and profitable direction. O Lord, all the glory is thine. Give thou me light: I will give others information: both of us shall give thee praise.”
The Pyramids of Egypt, the most ancient and the most colossal structures on the earth,—the purpose and appropriation of which has been much controverted by antiquaries and men of science,—have been considered by some to have served as Sun-dials. Sir Gardner Wilkinson does not pretend to explain the real object for which these stupendous monuments were constructed, but feels persuaded that they have served for tombs, and have also been intended for astronomical purposes. “The form of the exterior might lead to many useful calculations. They stand exactly due north and south; and while the direction of the faces to the east and west might serve to fix the return of a certain period of the year, the shadow cast by the sun, or the time of its coinciding with their slope, might be observed for a similar purpose.”
There is an interesting association of the Great Pyramid with the ambitious dream of one of the world’s celebrities, which may be noticed here. When Napoleon I. was in Egypt, in 1799, he rode on a camel to the Great Pyramid and the Sphinx, that relic of mystic grandeur. Karl Girardet has painted this impressive visit; and the picture has been engraved by Gautier, and inscribed, “Forty Centuries look down upon him.”
Charles Mackay has written a graceful poem as a pendent to this print; in which the poet makes the young Napoleon thus invoke the colossal monuments:
Ye haughty Pyramids!
Thou Sphinx, whose eyeless lids
On my presumptuous youth seem bent in scorn!
What though thou’st stood
Coeval with the flood,
Of all earth’s monuments the earliest born,
And I so mean and small,
With armies at my call,
Am recent in thy sight as grass of yestermorn!
Yet in this soul of mine
Is strength as great as thine,
O dull-eyed Sphinx that wouldst despise me now;
Is grandeur like thine own,
O melancholy stone,
With forty centuries furrow’d on thy brow;
Deep in my heart I feel
What time shall yet reveal,
That I shall tower o’er men, as o’er these deserts thou.
The dreamer of empire proceeds, bespeaking:
Nations yet to be,
Surging from Time’s deep sea,
Shall teach their babes the name of great Napoleon.
But hear the reply of the decaying oracle:
Over the mighty chief
There came a shadow of grief.
The lips gigantic seemed to move and say,
“Know’st thou his name that bid
Arise yon Pyramid?
Know’st thou who placed me where I stand to-day?
Thy deeds are but as sand
Strewn on the heedless land:
Think, little mortal, think, and pass upon thy way!
Pass, little mortal, pass!
Grow like the vernal grass—
The autumn sickle shall destroy thy prime.
But nations shout the word
Which ne’er before they heard,
The name of glory, fearful yet sublime.
The Pharaohs are forgot,
Their works confess them not:
Pass, hero! pass,—poor straw upon the gulf of Time!”
It will be remembered how Napoleon’s disastrous Egyptian campaign ended; and how he secretly embarked for France, and read during his passage both the Bible and the Koran with great assiduity.
Among the interesting memorials of Mary Queen of Scots at Holyrood Palace, Edinburgh, there remains the Sun-dial placed in the centre of the palace-garden, and usually denominated “Queen Mary’s Dial.”
It is the apex of a richly-ornamented pedestal, which rests upon a hexagonal base, consisting of three steps. The form of the ‘horologe’ is multangular; for though its principal sections are pentagonal, yet from their terminating in pyramidal points, and being diametrically opposed to each other, again connected by triangular interspaces, it presents no fewer than twenty sides, on which are placed twenty-two dials, inserted into circular, semicircular, and triangular cavities. Between the dials are the royal arms of Scotland, with the initials M. R., St. Andrew, St. George, fleurs-de-lis, and other emblems. This memorial carries us back nearly three centuries, when Holyrood was a palace
Where “Mary of Scotland” kept her court.
8. The Town and Country Magazine, edited by Albert Smith.
9. N. T. Heineken; Notes and Queries, 3d series.
10. We remember this motto for many years beneath a large figure of Time, executed in Coade and Seeley’s composition, and placed at the corner of the lane leading from Westminster Bridge Road to Pedlar’s Acre.
