liberal look hath that portion of it,
which, from three sides, overlooks the greater garden: that goodly
pile

Of building strong, albeit of Paper hight,

confronting, with massy contrast, the lighter, older, more
fantastically shrouded one, named of Harcourt, with the cheerful
Crown-office Row (place of my kindly engendure), right opposite the
stately stream, which washes the garden-foot with her yet scarcely
trade-polluted waters, and seems but just weaned from her Twickenham
Naiades! a man would give something to have been born in such places.
What a collegiate aspect has that fine Elizabethan hall, where the
fountain plays, 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 If its business-use be superseded by more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 art