time, though all the room be motionless. Why will design insist upon its
importunate immortality? Wiser is the drama, and wiser the dance, that
do not pause upon an 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