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.