shadows. The opportunity is so fine a thing that it ought oftener to be
offered to the light and to yonder handful of long sedges and rushes in a
vase. Their slender grey design of shadows upon white walls is better
than a tedious, trivial, or anxious device from the shop.

The shadow has all intricacies of perspective simply translated into line
and intersecting curve, and pictorially presented to the eyes, not to the
mind. The shadow knows nothing except its flat designs. It is single;
it draws a decoration that was never seen before, and will never be seen
again, and that, untouched, varies with the journey of the sun, shifts
the interrelation of a score of delicate lines at the mere passing of
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