手机版

SHADOWS

阅读 :

    SHADOWS

    Another good reason that we ought to leave blank, unvexed, and unencumbered with paper patterns the ceiling and walls of a simple house is that the plain surface may be visited by the unique designs of 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 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. Him who lies alone there the outer world touches less by this long sunshine than by the haste and passage of a shadow. Although there may be no tree to stand between his window and the south, and although no noonday wind may blow a branch of roses across the blind, shadows and their life will be carried across by a brilliant bird.

    To the sick man a cloud-shadow is nothing but an eclipse; he cannot see its shape, its color, its approach, or its flight. It does but darken his window as it darkens the day, and is gone again; he does not see it pluck and snatch the sun. But the flying bird shows him wings. What flash of light could be more bright for him than such a flash of darkness?

    It is the pulse of life, where all change had seemed to be charmed. If he had seen the bird itself he would have seen less――the bird's shadow was a message from the sun. There are two separated flights for the fancy to follow, the flight of the bird in the air, and the flight of its shadow on earth. This goes across the window blind, across the wood, where it is astray for a while in the shades; it dips into the valley, growing vaguer and larger, runs, quicker than the wind, uphill, smaller and darker on the soft and dry grass, and rushes to meet its bird when the bird swoops to a branch and clings.

    In the great bird country of the north-eastern littoral of England, about Holy Island and the basaltic rocks, the shadows of the high birds are the movement and the pulse of the solitude. Where there are no woods to make a shade, the sun suffers the brilliant eclipse of flocks of pearl-white sea birds, or of the solitary creature driving on the wind. Theirs is always a surprise of flight. The clouds go one way, but the birds go all ways: in from the sea or out, across the sands, inland to high northern fields, where the crops are late by a month. They fly so high that though they have the shadow of the sun under their wings, they have the light of the earth there also. The waves and the coast shine up to them, and they fly between lights.

    Black flocks and white they gather their delicate shadows up, "swift as dreams," at the end of their flight into the clefts, platforms, and ledges of harbourless rocks dominating the North Sea. They subside by degrees, with lessening and shortening volleys of wings and cries until there comes the general shadow of night wherewith the little shadows close, complete.

    The evening is the shadow of another flight. All the birds have traced wild and innumerable paths across the mid-May earth; their shadows have fled all day faster than her streams, and have overtaken all the movement of her wingless creatures. But now it is the flight of the very earth that carries her clasped shadow from the sun.

更多 英文美文英语美文英文短文英语短文,请继续关注 英语作文大全

散文
本文标题:SHADOWS - 英语短文_英语美文_英文美文
本文地址:http://www.dioenglish.com/writing/essay/54743.html

相关文章

  • 成功的人生不设限 英语美文推荐

    My son Joey was born with club feet. The doctors assured us that with treatment he would be able to walk normally — but would never run very well. The first three years of his life we...

    2018-10-31 英语短文
  • 励志的四篇短文

         Whether sixty or sixteen, there is in every human being's heart the lure of wonders, the unfailing childlike appetite of what's next and the joy of the game of living. In the center of yo...

    2018-12-14 英语短文
  • I will live this day as if it is my last

      And what shall I do with this last precious day which remains in my keeping? First, I will seal up its container of life so that not one drop spills itself upon the sand. I will waste not a moment m...

    2018-12-09 英语短文
  • 瓦尔登湖:The Pond in Winter2

      When I strolled around the pond in misty weather I was sometimes amused by the primitive mode which some ruder fisherman had adopted. He would perhaps have placed alder branches over the narro...

    2018-12-11 英语短文
  • 找一个理想中的梦幻室友

      1. Given the current state of the economy, many people are choosing to double up with a roommate to help share expenses.  1. 考虑到现在的经济形势,很多人都选择找一个室友来分摊房租。 ...

    2019-03-10 英语短文
  • Collection of Bacon (26)

    Of Seeming Wise It hath been an opinion, that the French are wiser than they seem;and the Spaniards seem wiser than they are. But howsoever it be between nations, certainly it is so between...

    2018-12-13 英语短文
  • 朱自清:荷塘月色(The Lotus Pool By Moonlight)

    The last few days have found me very restless. This evening as I sat in the yard to enjoy the cool, it struck me how different the lotus pool I pass every day must look under a full moon. The...

    2018-12-13 英语短文
  • 要多坚强才敢念念不忘:一篇关于失忆和记忆的奇特故事

    what's going on?andrew engel was completely confused. just days into his freshman year at rutgers university, he was sitting in so...

    2018-10-27 英语短文
  • Allen-Edmonds Keeps Its Shoes on an American Factory Floor

      PORT WASHINGTON, Wis.( Wiscinsin 威斯康星州美国州名) - The rumble, hum and clack of the Allen-Edmonds shoe factory went quiet in late December. Many of the machines that helped workers pack insole...

    2018-12-09 英语短文
  • 枣 核 萧乾 中英文对照版

    张培基英译中国现代散文选(一)之《枣 核》枣 核 ——萧乾 动身访美之前,一位旧时同窗写来航空信,再三托付我为他带几棵生枣核(1)。东西倒不占分量,可是用途却很蹊...

    2019-02-26 英语短文
你可能感兴趣