Time Telling through the Ages. Harry Brearley

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СКАЧАТЬ colored alternately black and white. Three of these parts were burned in one hour, making each inch represent twenty minutes, so that his six candles, lighted one after the other by his chaplains, would burn for twenty-four hours.

      The Eskimos also, through the long arctic night have watched the lamp which gives both light and heat to their cold huts of snow. But all these are no more than crude conveniences, whose irregularity is evident, and there is likewise no need to do more than call attention to the effect upon fire in any form, of wind or dampness in the air. The Roman lamp-clock sheltered from the weather was the best of them all, and was the only one which long continued in civilized use.

      Our chief interest in all such devices comes from the touch of poetry still remaining in the tradition of the sacred flame which must be kept forever burning, and in association of life and time with fire, in such parables as that of the Wise and Foolish Virgins. There is a reminder of this old time-keeping by fire in all that poetry and philosophy which tells of hope that still may live or of deeds that maybe done, "while the lamp holds out to burn."

      Thus far, in spite of occasional glimpses of the Middle Ages and of modern times, we have dealt, for the most part, with earlier ages. Now our story must leave these behind, and thus passes the ancient world with its strange pagan civilization which was so human, so wise and so simple. It is difficult for modern Americans even to imagine existence in ancient Greece or Rome or in still more ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia – since the whole attitude toward life was so essentially different from what it is to-day.

      Our debt to the ancients in this one matter of recording time is typical of that in many others. To them we owe our whole fundamental system and conception of it from the astronomy by which we measure our years and our seasons and make our appeal to the final standard of the stars, down to the arithmetic of our minutes and seconds and the very names of our months and days.

      In the modern application and practical use of all this, on the other hand, we owe them nothing. They never made a clock or watch, or any like device which has more than a merely ornamental use to-day. They gave us the general plan so well that we have never bettered it, but they left later generations to work out the details. They invented the second as a division of time but they did not measure by it. They did not care to try. For them, learning was the natural right and power of the few, and the gulf between the most that was known by the few and the little that was known in general, was like the gulf between great wealth and great poverty among ourselves.

      Indeed, in this age of teaching and preaching, when a thought seems to need only to be born in order to be spread abroad over the world, it is hard for us even to conceive the instinct by which men kept their learning like a secret among the initiated and felt no impulse to make known that which they knew.

      Their great men thought and did wonderful things which are now the common property of us all. And their common folk lived in a fashion astonishingly primitive by comparison, in an ignorance which certainly was weakness and may somehow have been bliss.

      That world of theirs is gone – the body and the spirit of it alike. And there remains to us, along with much of their art and their science, the hour-glass to symbolize that relentless flight of time which they feared but never tried to save; and the quaint sun-dial in our gardens, a memory of that worldly-wise old philosophy which counted only the shining hours.

      CHAPTER SIX

      The Clocks Which Named Themselves

      Now the scene changes again, and the story shifts forward over the interval of a thousand years. As we take up the tale once more, we find ourselves in another world, amid a life as different from that ancient life of which we have been speaking as either of them is from our own life to-day.

      The ancient civilization, which may be traced from Rome through Greece, Babylon and Egypt back to the dim dawn of history, is gone almost as if it had never been. For there came a period when great hordes of barbarians defeated the armies, burnt the cities, pillaged and destroyed, leaving only desolation and ruin behind them. Then followed hundreds of years of what we call the "Dark Ages," – ages of ignorance and violence, when mankind was slowly struggling upwards again and was forming a new civilization upon the ruins of the old. Therefore, at the point we have now reached, there are no more white temples and pillared porticos and sandaled men in white tunic and toga, and marble statues in green gardens; but everywhere we find sharp roofs and towers, quaint outlines, and wild color like a child's picture-book.

      There are castles with their moats and battlements, and monasteries with their cloistered arches; there are knights in armor riding, and lords and ladies gorgeous in strange garments, and monks in their dull gowns, and the sturdy peasant working in the field; and in the towns, all among peaked gables and Gothic windows and rough cobbled streets, a motley crowd of beggar and burgher and courtier, priest and clerk, doctor and scholar and soldier and merchant and tradesman – an endless variety of types, and each in the distinctive costume of his calling. And there are churches everywhere, from the huge cathedral towering like a forest of carven stone to the humble village chapel or wayside shrine, their spires all pointing up to heaven in token of the change that has come upon the life and spirit of the world.

      We have come from the height of the classic period suddenly into the heart of the Middle Ages; and in the dark centuries that lie between, Christ and His Disciples have come and gone, and the religion of the Western World has changed; the old gods have perished and the saints have filled their places. And Rome has died, and Romance has been born.

      The center of civilization has shifted to the north and west; from the old ring of lands around the Mediterranean to the great nations of modern Europe. Italy has become a jealous group of independent cities, great in art and commerce, but in little else. Germany is much the same, except for the lack of some few score centuries of tradition. France and Spain are already great and growing. William the Conqueror has fought and ruled and died, and the "Merry England" of song and story has grown up out of the fusion of Saxon and Norman. Chivalry and the Crusades, the times of Ivanhoe and The Talisman, are as fresh as yesterday.

      And by green hedgerows and hospitable inns, Chaucer's Pilgrims are plodding onward toward the sound of Canterbury's bells. For here is the point of all our seeking – that there are clocks now in the monasteries and in the Cathedral towers. There is just one curious link of likeness between the Middle Ages and the remoter past; as it was at first at Babylon, so now in the fourteenth century the priesthood holds almost a monopoly of science and of learning.

      Thus, although the sun-dial, clepsydra and sand-glass are still much used, we find ourselves at last in the time and lands of clocks. The very sound of the word "clock" gives a clue to its origin. It suggests the striking of the hour upon some bell. The French called the word cloche and the Saxons clugga, and both of these originally meant a bell.

      If you will put yourself back in the picture at the beginning of the chapter, you will find yourself in a realm of sounding, pealing, chiming bells with the hours of prayer throughout the day, from matins to angelus, rung out from the belfries, and with frequent deep-toned strikings of the hour. Not even a blind man could have remained unconscious of the passage of the hours under such conditions, and time, in a sense, became more a possession of democracy although timepieces themselves were still the mark of special privilege.

      Life also was beginning to hurry just a little. Very deliberate, we should call it in comparison with the mad rush of the twentieth century, and yet it began to show its growing complexity in that humanity was becoming more definitely organized and men were forced to depend more and more upon each other. In all of this, there was a slightly growing sense of the things that were to be, just as the water for some miles above Niagara begins to hasten its course under the influence of the mighty cataract over which it will at last go madly plunging.

      Herein occurs another of those baffling questions, like the СКАЧАТЬ