which I have made to rise and fall, how many times! to the astoundment of the young urchins, my contemporaries, who, not being able to guess at its recondite machinery, were almost tempted to hail the wondrous work as magic!  What an antique air had the now almost effaced sundials, 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 would 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!

  Ah! 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  If its business-use be superseded by more elaborate inventions, its moral uses, its beauty, might have pleaded for its continuance.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 sun-set, 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 mottos 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.  I must quote his verses a little higher up, for they are full, as all his serious poetry was, of a witty delicacy.  They will not come in awkwardly, I hope, in a talk of fountains and sun-dials.  He is speaking of sweet garden scenes: 

  What wondrous life in this I lead! 
  Ripe apples drop about my head. 
  The luscious clusters of the vine
  Upon my mouth do crush their wine. 
  The nectarine, and curious peach,
  Into my hands themselves do reach. 
  Stumbling on melons, as I pass,
  Insnared with flowers, I fall on grass. 
  Meanwhile the mind from pleasure less
  Withdraws into its happiness. 
  The mind, that ocean, where each kind
  Does straight its own resemblance find;
  Yet it creates, transcending these,
  Far other worlds, and other seas;
  Annihilating all that’s made
  To a green thought in a green shade. 
  Here at the fountain’s sliding foot,
  Or at some fruit-tree’s mossy root,
  Casting the body’s vest aside,
  My soul into the boughs does glide: 
  There, like a bird, it sits and sings,