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 shado