K.G.

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Pliny in his Natural History alludes to the marks of time exhibited in the regular opening and closing of flowers.  Linnaeus enumerates forty-six flowers that might be used for the construction of a floral time-piece.  This great Swedish botanist invented a Floral horologe, “whose wheels were the sun and earth and whose index-figures were flowers.”  Perhaps his invention, however, was not wholly original.  Andrew Marvell in his “Thoughts in a Garden” mentions a sort of floral dial:—­

    How well the skilful gardener drew
    Of flowers and herbs this dial new! 
    Where, from above, the milder sun
    Does through a fragrant zodiac run: 
    And, as it works, th’industrious bee
    Computes its time as well as we: 
    How could such sweet and wholesome hours
    Be reckoned, but with herbs and flowers?

Marvell[106]

Milton’s notation of time—­“at shut of evening flowers,” has a beautiful simplicity, and though Shakespeare does not seem to have marked his time on a floral clock, yet, like all true poets, he has made very free use of other appearances of nature to indicate the commencement and the close of day.

    The sun no sooner shall the mountains touch—­
    Than we will ship him hence.

Hamlet.

    Fare thee well at once! 
    The glow-worm shows the matin to be near
    And gins to pale his uneffectual fire.

Hamlet.

    But look!  The morn, in russet mantle clad,
    Walks o’er the dew of yon high eastern hill:—­
    Break we our watch up.

Hamlet.

        Light thickens, and the crow
    Makes wing to the rooky wood.

Macbeth.

Such picturesque notations of time as these, are in the works of Shakespeare, as thick as autumnal leaves that strew the brooks in Valombrosa.  In one of his Sonnets he thus counts the years of human life by the succession of the seasons.

    To me, fair friend, you never can be old,
    For as you were when first your eye I eyed,
    Such seems your beauty still.  Three winters cold
    Have from the forests shook three summers’ pride;
    Three beauteous springs to yellow autumn turned
    In process of the seasons have I seen;
    Three April’s perfumes in three hot Junes burned
    Since first I saw you fresh which yet are green.

Grainger, a prosaic verse-writer who once commenced a paragraph of a poem with “Now, Muse, let’s sing of rats!” called upon the slave drivers in the West Indies to time their imposition of cruel tasks by the opening and closing of flowers.