This porcelain mantle clock was made by the Wedgwood company, and its manufacture dates to about 1880. The porcelain case consists of columns decorated with raised floral decorations flanking a central panel with a design featuring a basket of flowers. The columns are surmounted by an arched top displaying the image of a sunrise (or a sunset) in the tympanum. On the top is a globe-shaped finial. The clock face is of porcelain behind glass, set in a circular brass ring. A single keyhole pierces the clock face just above the numeral “VI”.
Along the top arch is printed a line in Latin that reads “EHEU! FUGACES LABUNTUR ANNI!”, which can be translated as “Alas! The fleeting years glide swiftly by!” The words come from an ode, a form of lyric poem intended to be accompanied by music, by Roman poet Horace (65 – 8 BC), specifically the 14th ode from his second book of songs. The ode addresses the relentless march of time, the inevitability of aging, and mortality.
The clock originally belonged to Thomas Gold Appleton, who might have been attracted to the piece by both the sentiment expressed in the words printed on it as well as by their writer. Like Horace, Appleton was a lover of literature and poetry and even dabbled in it himself, publishing poems during his life, including odes. Appleton was conscious though of his limitations in the creation of such work, admitting in a letter to his father in 1844 that “I have not any of the kind of talent needful to success here.” As this clock was obtained later in his life, the message on it perhaps resonated with him. He died in 1884, likely not long after he acquired this piece.
The clock is visible in a photograph of Appleton’s parlor at his Boston home on Commonwealth Ave., taken shortly after his death. It is listed in his will as one of the many pieces given to his nephew Charles Appleton Longfellow, which is probably how it came to be part of the Longfellow House furnishings. After Charles’s death in 1893 the clock passed to his sister Alice, who placed it in a guest bedroom where it is displayed today.