Shine

“ It helps the sun to shine, and his rays fall on its page to illustrate it. It spends the mornings and the evenings, and makes such an impression on us over night as to awaken us before dawn, and its influence lingers around us like a fragrance late into the day. It conveys a new gloss to the meadows and the depths of the wood. ”

“ She presently paves from herself to us a street of silver among the long blue shadows, and lights it with a thousand stars; some fallen quite to earth, some twinkling among the drooping branches, all as bright as the eternal stars that shine in the blue sky above. ”

“ The smoke ascends
In a rosy-and-golden haze. The spires
Shine, and are changed. In the valley
Shadows rise. The lark sings on. The sun,
Closing his benediction,
p. 162Sinks, and the darkening air
Thrills with a sense of the triumphing night—
Night with her train of stars
And her great gift of sleep. ”

“ A shine is that which when covered changes permission. An enclosure blends with the same that is to say there is blending. A blend is that which holds no mice and this is not because of a floor it is because of nothing, it is not in a vision. ”

“ It is a coolness of colour, as well as of a leaf which the breeze takes on both sides—the greenish and the greyish. The poplar green has no glows, no gold; it is an austere colour, as little rich as the colour of willows, and less silvery than theirs. The sun can hardly gild it; but he can shine between. Poplars and aspens let the sun through with the wind. ”

“ Now, as the light falls upon the flowers and shines through the petals, the whole bunch is transfigured. It has taken on a new appearance of beauty. Like a face that has suddenly lighted up with an expression of happiness, the flowers seem alive with radiance. They too, have their expression and it will change with the changing of light. For look at them again toward evening, when the light is low, and their faces, not less beautiful, will show a quite different expression. ”

“ A warm, sunny exposure invites the use of contrastingly cool light blues, grays, greens, and creams; while the glow of delicate pinks and yellows helps to make a sunshine in the shadows of a north light. ”

“ Of all the things that London has foregone, the most to be regretted is the horizon. Not the bark of the trees in its right colour; not the spirit of the growing grass, which has in some way escaped from the parks; not the smell of the earth unmingled with the odour of soot; but rather the mere horizon. No doubt the sun makes a beautiful thing of the London smoke at times, and in some places of the sky; but not there, not where the soft sharp distance ought to shine. To be dull there is to put all relations and comparisons in the wrong, and to make the sky lawless. ”

“ For cresses from the rills,
Have known thee watching, all an April day,
The springing pastures and the feeding kine;
And mark'd thee, when the stars come out and shine,
Through the long dewy grass move slow away. ”

“ A trace of gold and bright colours is still discernible on the blinds of the tall lattice windows, the glass of which shines with the iridescent colours that so many days of sunshine and of rain have wrought into it ”

“ The sunshine of thine eyes,
(Oh still, celestial beam!)
Whatever it touches it fills
With the life of its lambent gleam.
The sunshine of thine eyes,
Oh let it fall on me!
Though I be but a mote of the air,
I could turn to gold for thee! ”

“ Like Him because we see Him, we shall see Him more because we have assimilated what we see, as the sunshine opens the petals, and tints the flower with its own colours the more deeply, the wider it opens. ”

“ We sit frost-bitten and almost dead among the snows, and all the while the gracious sunshine is pouring down, that is able to melt the white death that covers us, and to free us from the bonds that hold us prisoned in their benumbing clasp. ”

“ It was then ten in the morning; the rays of the sun struck the surface of the waves at rather an oblique angle, and at the touch of their light, decomposed by refraction as through a prism, flowers, rocks, plants, shells and polypi were shaded at the edges by the seven solar colors. It was marvelous, a feast for the eyes, this complication of colored tints, a perfect kaleidoscope of green, yellow, orange, violet, indigo, and blue; in one word, the whole palette of an enthusiastic colorist! ”

“ Bright like a sun,—
My dream.
And then the wall rose,
Rose slowly,
Slowly,
Between me and my dream.
Rose slowly, slowly,
Dimming,
Hiding,
The light of my dream.
Rose until it touched the sky,—
The wall.
Shadow.
I am black.
I lie down in the shadow. ”

“ No grander vision of judgment exists than Malachi's picture of 'the day,' lurid, on the one hand, with the fierce flame, before which the wicked are as stubble that crackles for a moment and then is grey ashes, or as a tree in a forest fire, which stands for a little while, a pillar of flame, and then falls with a crash, shaking the woods; and on the otherhand, radiant with the early beams of healing sunshine, in whose sweet morning light the cattle, let out from their pent-up stalls, gambol in glee. ”

“ This wonderful contrast of bright and dark, of glitter and solemnity, the splendour of sunlight and the solemnity of shade, can only be fully appreciated in southern or eastern countries. The pitch of light being higher the shade seems deeper, and yet it is a shade full of colour always. When the sun sinks, in the short afterglow everything seems fused in an atmosphere of luminous colour and half-tone, which transfigures and glorifies everything. ”

“ When, therefore, the main relations of colour have been all set out and decided for your window, turn your attention to small differences, to harmonies round the harmonies. Make each note into a chord, each tint into a group of tints, not only the strong and bold, but also the subtle and tender; do not miss the value of small modifications of tint that soften brilliance into glow. Study how Nature does it on the petals of the pansy or sweet-pea. You think a pansy is purple, and there an end? ”

“ A horizon dark with storm is another thing. The weather darkens the line and defines it, or mingles it with the raining cloud; or softly dims it, or blackens it against a gleam of narrow sunshine in the sky. The stormy horizon will take wing, and the sunny. Go high enough, and you can raise the light from beyond the shower, and the shadow from behind the ray. Only the shapeless and lifeless smoke disobeys and defeats the summer of the eyes.
Up at the top of the seaward hill your first thought is one of some compassion for sailors, inasmuch as they see but little of their sea. ”

“ Thine eyes are as my lamp's eternal glow.
Amid thy beauty's temple I would fare,
The incense fragrance 'mid thy breath abides;
Like night, that all in starry splendour hides,
Let fall on me thy dark, luxuriant hair. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The beauty lies in the colouring. What a feast these ruins afford to the eye by their colour, what a revel of blues, greens, and low-toned reds in their unfaded paintings! Taken as bits of colour only, without dwelling too much on the forms, all in such light, the shadows filled with golden reflections—taken thus, or deeply tinged with the lustrous after-glow, or the golden moonlight, they are all-satisfying. ”

“ Light, marvellously soft yet penetrating, everywhere diffused, everywhere reflected without radiance, poured from the moon high above our heads in a sky tinted through all shades and modulations of blue, from turquoise on the horizon to opaque sapphire at the zenith—dolce color. ”

“ Sometimes out of the dusk all tremulous with tinted light the rainbow ray of a jewel flashed in his eyes—or sometimes he caught the glint of eyes above the jewel—a passing view of a fair face, a moment's encountering glance, and, maybe, a smile just as the shadows falling turned the garden's brightness to a mystery peopled with phantoms. ”

“ And even in this darkness the roses have colour, more beautiful perhaps than ever. If colour be, as they say, but the effect of light on various fibre, one may think of it as a tune, the song of thanksgiving that each form puts forth, to sun and moon and stars and fire. ”

“ The dull, threatening clouds are tinted with the pink of rose petals. The sea loses its dull foreboding and like the sky becomes a thing of beauty. Brighter colors follow, red, orange, yellow, and after that, with a low whisper of wavelets the day is ushered in. ”

“ All those, seen through the clear crystal water, the ripple of which gave motion and quick play of light and shadow to the whole, formed a scene of the rarest beauty, and left nothing to be desired by the eye, either in elegance of form or brilliancy and harmony of colouring. ”

“ Under the glow of a student’s lamp I look upon the beloved face, the flowing hair and beard now silvered with the lapse of years—a face of unusual firmness, but whose every line marks the expression of a tender, loving nature, and of a large and noble heart. ”

“ Forth from this maze of mingling tints, indefinite in shade and sunbeams, lean earnest, saintly faces—ineffably pure—adoring, pitying, pleading; raising their eyes in ecstasy to heaven, or turning them in ruth toward earth. ”

“ Colour that speaks the tongue of the gods when thought falls dead and the sound of speech is mere hollowness.
When the colour faded big purple clouds began to drift up over the pale yellow sky until it was all a wonderful thick purple-blue darkness in which sounds were both clear and muffled; faraway sounds were clear, and sounds close at hand were muffled and eerie; pale milk-grey lights began to slide through the darkness. ”

“ Sweet light shall couch by flowery sapphire and blue violets, and dance with jocund joys where the white daisies tesselate the mead; then memory shall illuminate itself—turn out its store of images bright as at their creation; then shall the soul arrange its myriad hues of by-gone time; dwell over the glory of the spiritual scene, until, in extasy and grateful joy, a voice shall shout,—"How beautiful is Light." ”

“ One would think that one had come upon a meadow full of flowers in bloom—one wonders at the purple tints of some, the green of others, the glowing red and glittering white, and those, too, which nature, like a painter, has marked with the strongest contrasts of colour. ”

“ A striking illustration in nature of a Perfected Harmony was seen one bright autumn morning in a species of woodbine covering the side of a red brick building, in which could be discovered an infinite variety of colors in greens and violet-reds whose tones were increased in number and intensified in effect by the reflections of the sunlight and the corresponding shadows, producing very light tints and very dark shades of various hues of the complementary colors, and forming a complicated and wonderfully beautiful effect very definitely classified as a Perfected Harmony. ”

“ Greens and blues, purples and whites, melt into one another, fade, and come again, and change with the changing sun. Sometimes they are as richly diaphanous as a precious stone, and glow from within with a deep, inexplicable light. ”

“ For all harmony depends, first, on the fixed proportion of the color of the light to that of the relative shadow; and therefore if I fasten my color, I must fasten my shade. But on a round surface the shadow changes at every hour of the day ”

“ But that comparison tells you nothing. I can find no simile with which to describe the beauties of its shades and tints. It was red, but it also was golden, as if the enamoured sun had gilded every hair with its radiance. ”

“ And withal, from the other side came a great sweetness as of summer roses upon the air; but a few paces farther on, white roses, like floods of surging foam, overtopped the high wall. Between the whiteness [Pg 21] of uncounted roses scarce any green at all might show. Now as the merchant beheld these foam-white flowers, he thought on Beauty’s simple wish. ”

“ For them the rainbow glowed in every drop the trailing mists scattered in their wake; for them the pale light of the sun was pure gold of dreams; every frail, courageous flower a delicate censor of fragrance. ”

“ The sun is now shining on them with overpowering brightness; the metallic ornaments on their windows glitter like gems of fire; even the trees which form their groves partake of the universal flow of light, and fail, like the objects around them, to offer to the weary eye either refreshment or repose. ”

“ A shadow had just fallen upon the surface of the queen of night, slowly if spread over it until the face of the great luminary was covered, and it hung in the cloudless heavens an orb of roseate hue, its radiance all gone. ”

“ This hair, fine, strong, resistant, vibrant in light sonority, and, with all that, soft, warm, luminous, and electric,—it is the flower of the human flower. There are idle disputes concerning the merit of its color. What matter? The lustrous black contains and promises the flame. ”

“ Here is light in all its purity and perfection. The blue of a young girl’s eyes, or the delicate green of April meadows, seem gross and hard in comparison with this light. It is quiet, yet alive with beauty. ”

“ When the lamp is shattered The light in the dust lies dead— When the cloud is scattered The rainbow's glory is shed. When the lute is broken, Sweet tones are remembered not; When the lips have spoken, Loved accents are soon forgot. ”