attitude. But these walk with passion or pleasure,
while the shadow walks with the earth. It alters as the hours wheel.

Moreover, while the habit of your sunward thoughts is still flowing
southward, after the winter and the spring, it surprises you in the
sudden gleam of a north-westering sun. It decks a new wall; it is shed
by a late sunset through a window unvisited for a year past; it betrays
the flitting of the sun into unwonted skies--a sun that takes the
midsummer world in the rear, and shows his head at a sally-porte, and is
about to alight on an unused horizon. So does the grey drawing, with
which you have allowed the sun and your pot of rushes to adorn your room,
play the stealthy game of the year.

You need not stint yourself of shadows, for an occasion. It needs but
four candles to make a hanging Oriental bell play the most buoyant
jugglery overhead. Two lamps make of one palm-branch a symmetrical
countercharge of shadows, and here two palm-branches close with one
another in shadow, their arches flowing together, and their paler greys
darkening. It is hard to believe that there are many to prefer a
"repeating pattern."

It must be granted to them that a grey day robs of their decoration the
walls that should be sprinkled with shadows. Let, then, a plaque or a
picture be kept for hanging on shadowless clays. To dress a room once
for all, and to give it no more heed, is to neglect the units of the
days.

Shadows within doors are yet only messages from that world of shadows
which is the landscape of sunshine. Facing a May sun you see little
except an infinite number of shadows. Atoms of shadow--be the day bright
enough--compose the very air through which you see the light. The trees
show you a shadow for every leaf, and the poplars are sprinkled upon the
shining sky with little shadows that look translucent. The liveliness of
every shadow is that some light is reflected into it; shade and shine
have been entangled as though by some wild wind through their million
molecules.

The coolness and the dark of night are interlocked with the unclouded
sun. Turn sunward from the north, and shadows come to life, and are
themselves the life, the action, and the transparence of their day.

To eyes tired and retired all day within lowered blinds, the light looks
still and changeless. So many squares of sunshine abide for so many
hours, and when the sun has circled away they pass and are extinguished.