nist 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.

Till morning dawn and Lucifer withdraw
His beamy chariot, let not the loud bell
Call forth thy negroes from their rushy couch:
And ere the sun with mid-day fervor glow,
When every broom-bush o