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Updated: May 4, 2025
Samuel Kercheval, and also in an interesting Philadelphia publication, "Friends in Exile." To this day the old sun-dial in the garden of "Bousch's Tavern" has upon it the inscription: "Exul patria causâ libertates" with the names of the unfortunate exiles written under it always provided that the dial itself remains, and the rain, and snow, and sun, have not blotted out the words.
They divided the equator into three hundred and sixty degrees and they divided the day into twenty-four hours and the hour into sixty minutes and no modern man has ever been able to improve upon this old Babylonian invention. They possessed no watches but they measured time by the shadow of the sun-dial. The Chaldeans also were the first people to recognize the necessity of a regular day of rest.
When I went to lodge in the Rue Neuve des Petits Champs, opposite to my windows at the Hotel de Ponchartrain, there was a sun-dial, on which for a whole month I used all my efforts to teach her to know the hours; yet, she scarcely knows them at present.
Rising out of the grass, tangled round the sun-dial, wreathing the tree trunks and hanging from their branches, climbing up the walls and spreading over them with long garlands falling in cascades they came alive day by day, hour by hour.
Here was a real old herbal garden, gay with flowers and intersected by tiled moss-grown paths. There were bushes exhibiting fantastic examples of the topiary art, and here, too, was a sun-dial. My first impression of this beautiful spot was one of delight.
Yonder stood the old bronze sun-dial that I knew so well I could have read the inscription, I Mark Only Pleasant Hours; and I knew its penciled shadow pointed to a high and glorious noon.... It seemed to me that Heaven had never made a more perfect place or a more perfect day; nor, that I am sure, was ever in the universe a world more beautiful than this, more fit to swing in union with all the harmony of the spheres.... I had fought so long, I had been so unhappy, had doubted so much, had grown so sad, so misanthropic, that I trust I shall be forgiven at this sudden joy I felt at hearing burst on my ears albeit a chorus of Edouard's mocking-birds hid in the oaks all the music of the spheres, soul-shaking, a thing of joy and reverence.... So I spoke but little.
It was too dark for them to see the statue of Minerva on the peak of the high gable and the sun-dial on its face with the circle of animals, but the lighted windows on the ground-floor and in the first story gave the house a hospitable air. Frau Schimmel who had long been awaiting their arrival went out to meet them and the new man servant held the lantern so that they could see her curtseys.
The sheep are feeding there, when I kneel up, early in the morning, in my little bed in a closet within my mother's room, to look out at it; and I see the red light shining on the sun-dial, and think within myself, 'Is the sun-dial glad, I wonder, that it can tell the time again? Here is our pew in the church. What a high-backed pew!
He was standing in the centre of the room examining an unusual trinket a gold hoop like a bracelet, with numbers and the zodiac signs engraved on the inner surface. Mr. Brimsdown had discovered it in a Kingsway curiosity shop a week before. It was a portable sun-dial of the sixteenth century.
We now stand before it in daylight. Not a pane of glass is to be found in it; planks and old doors are nailed fast to the window frames; the balls alone still stand on the two towers, broad, heavy, and resembling colossal toadstools. The iron spire of the one still towers aloft in the air; the other spire is bent: like the hands on a sun-dial it shows the time the time that is gone.
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