i6o The Landscape Gardening Book 



passing. They belong to the dark ages when men governed 

 themselves through their fears, when virtue lay in gloom, and 

 when the fairest hours must always have some dismal thought 

 to temper them, lest anyone by some mischance should be 

 completely filled with jo>. 



How much better and finer is the thought in this old Latin 

 motto : ' 'Let the mind know no twUight. " Or in this other, which 

 furnishes a motto for right living, " I count the bright hours 

 only. ' ' The same idea is in the charming couplet : 



" The hours unless the hours are bright it is not mine to mark ; 

 I am the prophet of the light, dumb when the sun is dark. " 



And how happy and simny is "Amidst ye fioweres I tell ye 

 houres. " What a sense of duty well and contentedly performed. 



The location of a dial should be worthy of it as an "altar." 

 Indeed the garden may well develop around it, or to it, as its 

 crowning achievement. A delightful position for it is on the 

 center of a curving seat, in place of the table suggested. This 

 means that the seat will be in the sun, for of course the dial must 

 be. But trees back of the seat may give it partial shelter, and 

 a combination of a seat with the dial ought always to be made. 

 Put another seat somewhere else, for shade; a seat by a sun-dial, 

 to use in the moonlight, is worth sacrificing shade and a good 

 many other things, to have. 



Its setting is a thing to be determined by circumstances in a 

 measure, though I do not feel that any really crude device for 

 upholding it can ever be very effective. A thick tree trunk 

 cut at the convenient height may not be unattractive when 

 clothed with ivy, but a huge stone or boulder seems far better, 

 if a natural pedestal is desired. The stone has a sort of Druid 

 dignity which the rough wood lacks. It ought never to be low 



