Henry van Dyke wrote this for the sundial at Katrina Trask’s community retreat at Yaddo, New York.
Katrina Trask founded, funded and following a heart attack in 1913 lived at Yaddo, the artists’ community in Saratoga Springs, New York — her late husband, Spencer Trask, had been a Wall Street banker. One of her friends was Henry van Dyke, a professor of English literature at Princeton from 1899 to 1923, who wrote these lines for her sundial.