SHADOWS.

Otago Witness, Issue 2892, 11 August 1909, Page 73

SHADOWS.

It is only sometimes, and at rare times, that we realise the beauty of shadows. Yet of a truth it is only when the joy of life is dead that the heart (henceforth r hopeless hermit in its narrow cell) resigns itself to dwelling in the shade. Bu£ shade is not shadow — the two are far apart though near akin, and both the children of the light Preachers preach to us and poets sing to us of the danger of throwing away the substance for the shadow, and the domestic moralist is always at hand to point the moral to deaf ears ! The shadow is so lovely. Here in this still lake, girdled with forest primeval and fringed in long, shallow reaches by golden sedges and pale water-grasses, the shadow of each shafted tree column crowned with its rich foliage, each slender tree-fern (reaching graceful fronds to touch the water, each flaming bacchanal of common rata, is richer, clearer, more intense than the living reality. The shadow is more lovely than the substance So, too, in some now still and silent memory, the shadow of the past, its passions, with their wild agony of joy and sorrow, its moments of bliss, and hours of renunciation live again with a strength, a clearness, and a. delicacy bdrn only of the clearer vision of the onlooker. When these things happened we were too busy living the substance. We knew not how they looked, their beauty or their sadness : swept along in the wild stream on the crowded highway, all was action, motion, life. Now in the still waters of memory, in the clear vision of that after knowledge which is the grim gift of experience, we see each motive, act, folly, Tegret — clear-cut shadows wrought to a pathetic and irrevocable whole. There are times when all the pomp and glory of colour is outdone by the exquisite fragile austerity of a shadow. And we worship that shadow. There are natures bleached of passion, purified of selfishness, uplifted in ideals, whose very aloofness draws us, as the highei eternally draws the lower, and whose companionship reveals to us the beauty of shadow. For we know instinctively, though perhaps never in words, that the shadow of death, of loss, or of sorrow has fallen upon their lives and taught them the mysteries that the sunshine knows not ! , The brighter the sunshin* the darker the ! shadow. And that is one of these simple truths which we know, only to forget. Yet it is worth remembering, for it brings with it the inevitable reflection that there are thousands of lives at this veTy moment so destitute of sunshine that they know no shadow, but live in one unbroken shade. It is a terrible thought. Not sunshine and shadow, each the complement of the other, at once a contrast and a harmony from which may be evolved the perfect whole, but the cold grey, the hopeless monotone of unrelieved shade. When we chafe at the shadows, we forget that it takes sunshine to make them. When we welcome the sun, we take no thought of the shadows, which are one of his loveliest gifts to us. Yet just to set the thoughts adrift on the floodtide of shadows is to recall a series of life's loveliest memories. The swift, silent shadow of the white gull's wings as he swoops on his prey in- the tidal river the low-sailing of the great cloud shadow over the brilliant green of the upland barley fields ; ths sombre richness of the green shadow that the forest flings upon the lake ; the dimpling, golden network of the racing shadows that flash through the shallows of the bush oreek ere our horses splash through the ford and trust their velvet nostrils into the dimpling current ; the green-gold shadows of the silver birch, delicate, dancing, as the sun sifts down between their light tracery on the road to Paradise— all the,f>e, aye, and a score of other memories of the loveliest aspects of Nature, crowd upon the inner vision when we eet our ship of dreams to Shadow-land. The winds of memory fill the sails of thought, and now we watch, the cloudshadows sweep up from the low horizon where sea meets sky. Lying on the warm fand, with its close £&dgy gra-e. among the scented £?orse, irresponsible idlers, we, taking no thought of time, -natch the silent, capricious passing of the cloudghadows, set to the bizarre music of the skylark showering down his heedless song above us, and the hareh cries of the greedy gulls as they circle round the shipping in the river. Did evar artist dare to dream of that magnificent mingling of every blue

under hearetr -tßs the cloud-shadows sweep ! across the ocean and dim the placid stillness of the splendid sun&hine slumbering on the estuary? How the flashing sparkle of the brilliant cobalts and ultramarines is clouded and stained with sullen greens, with passionate purples, with royal, incredible blues. And all because of the shadows, the. mysterious, manifold shadows, in whose treasure house slumber such pos- i sibilities as the sunshine knows naught of. There aTe a score of shadow-pictures — they pass, each a thing of joy and beauty, of deep and infinite variety, for capricious memory turns from sea to land — far, far inland. Here, among the mountains, where they rise range on barren range, pinnacle on rocky pinnacle, bathed all day in the fierce sun, with never a wind-stirred ieaf and nev«r a rood of grass to veil their century-old nakedness — 'how grateful are the evening shadows ! Veritably "the shadow of a great rock in a dry and thirsty land." All day longj the vast elopes of mica schist have shimmered and crumbled in the sun ; all" day long the grey peaks (naked enough without their soft winter snows) have been silhouetted against the hard blue of a cloudless -sky ; all day long the foam bells of the panting little waves have flung their hurried rhythm along the leagues of rocky shore., till the millions of separate sounds have blent Into one confused murmur, and the voice of the lake has seemed the voice of a great, .distant city,, and in all the landscape, sun-drenched mountains, brilliant sky, * and 'glittering lake was neither rest nor shade' Sabr distance, naught but the glare, of crude palpitating colour, the sharpness of a detail at once wonderful and .merciless. • „ Such a Nature-memory has its analogy in human lives such, as we can aU of ois, I think, recall amid our experiences. That of the man or woman born, as the old phrase gc«s, "with a silver spoon in the mouth," smiled upon by fortune, warmed by the ail-encompassing ©uri. of 'wealth and all that wealth means, . every wish apparently gratified, not a cloud in the sky, not ' a visible shadow to soften the aggressive prosperity which mocks tha less fortunate. Prosperity has spoilt these favourites oi fortune. Untoucnied by" the sympathy born in the lovely softness of-. those shadows which pertain to commonplace life — bard, self-seeking, ambitious, penetrated with the world and the things thereof, their charities are cheques, their kindri'Siss, .condescension ; their bjanefaetions, burdens.. We shrink from the ,coldl aura which surrounds them as _f rom. an east wind, and would sooner ,wt>rk for a critet than come within * the radius of their oast-iron kinckness. Nor - can the evening, of life bring to their warped and stunted natures the redeeming beauty and charm that' evening brings to even a barren landscape. • Nature naturally responds to the proeesess of her Maker. Human nature, persistently waTped and distorted, remains cramped and unlovely as the human grotesques of Victor Hugo's Ccmprachicos. Let us return to Nature : take for our final memory of shadows the transformation wrought upon that majestic solitude of lake and mountain when afternoon grows into evening and the magic of the shadows grows with every passing hour*. ¥ov when in late afternoon the splendid sun sinks slowly towards the crests of the mighty mountains, and the shadows grow in every gully and brood in ©very deep ravine., then, indeed, is the • world transfigured I Lovely pinnacles, fairy castles that we knew not of, splendid bluffs, sheer precipices, 'ong ravines, where the foam of 'falling water gleams from the puorple shadow ; the magnificent wave-like curve of low-lying lands as they sweej up to the rocky ramparts that are at once their defence and their prison — all these are revealed to us as the shadows grow. The purple of kings, tihs blue of the virgin, the luminous warm grey that typifies our commoner clay and melts into* the near reality of the imperial purple and the far distance of the heavenly blue— these are the evanescent glories of the shadow ventures that clothe departing day among the moiin tains. Yet when all the shadows have blent into ©hade, and the lake and valley alike lie cold and colourless, the gloiy of departing day lingers on the pointed pinnacles of the mountains. who3e base is lost in 'shadow. So above all the changing shadows of our little day the Light of the hereafter will not fail us un-til the merciful night of rest enfolds us, and the dawn of the new day — that lovely day in which it may be given to us to redeem the mistakes of the old day — breaks for each of us. And there will be shadows there too, if souls m.ed them as much as bodi-as do.