The Rhythm of Life, and Other Essays

								

incalculable, infinite, and they deepen from the central fire.  As to the
earthly scenery, there are but two 'views' on the plain; for the aspect
of the light is the whole landscape.  To look with the sun or against the
sun--this is the alternative splendour.  To look with the sun is to face
a golden country, shadowless, serene, noble and strong in light, with a
certain lack of relief that suggests--to those who dream of landscape--the
country of a dream.  The serried pines, and the lighted fields, and the
golden ricks of the farms are dyed with the sun as one might paint with a
colour.  Bright as it is, the glow is rather the dye of sunlight than its
luminosity.  For by a kind of paradox the luminous landscape is that
which is full of shadows--the landscape before you when you turn and face
the sun.  Not only every reed and rush of the salt marshes, every
uncertain aspen-leaf of the few trees, but every particle of the October
air shows a shadow and makes a mystery of the light.  There is nothing
but shadow and sun; colour is absorbed and the landscape is reduced to a
shining simplicity.  Thus is the dominant sun sufficient for his day.  His
passage kindles to unconsuming fires and quenches into living ashes.  No
incidents save of his causing, no delight save of his giving: from the
sunrise, when the larks, not for pairing, but for play, sing the only
virginal song of the year--a heart younger than Spring's in the season of
decline--even to the sunset, when the herons scream together in the
shallows.  And the sun dominates by his absence, compelling the low
country to sadness in the melancholy night.

THE FLOWER

There is a form of oppression that has not until now been confessed by
those who suffer from it or who are participants, as mere witnesses, in
its tyranny.  It is the obsession of man by the flower.  In the shape of
the flower his own paltriness revisits him--his triviality, his sloth,
his cheapness, his wholesale habitualness, his slatternly ostentation.
These return to him and wreak upon him their dull revenges.  What the
tyranny really had grown to can be gauged nowhere so well as in country
lodgings, where the most ordinary things of design and decoration have
sifted down and gathered together, so that foolish ornament gains a
cumulative force and achieves a conspicuous commonness.  Stem and petal
and leaf--the fluent forms that a man has not by heart but certainly by
rote--are woven, printed, cast, and stamped wherever restlessness and
insimplicity have feared to leave plain spaces.  The most ugly of all
imaginable rooms, which is probably the parlour of a farm-house arrayed
for those whom Americans call summer-boarders, is beset with flowers.  It
blooms, a dry, woollen, papery, cast-iron garden.  The floor flourishes
with blossoms adust, poorly conventionalised into a kind of order; the
table-cover is ablaze with a more realistic florescence; the wall-paper