from her book "the spring of joy" . . . "if you will go out on some june morning, before the earliest bee comes droning by, when the stripes of sunrise lie right across the awakening earth, you will know the fascination of shadows. on such a day they are almost as blue as chicory. as a child, i remember standing awe-stricken at the strange beauty of a well-known field in the magic of a june dawn. it had a line of tall trees in its eastern hedge, and if you watched while the sun rose, you saw what had been a wide, grey expanse suddenly spanned by swart, prostrate giants. perhaps the memory of such fresh delights, like dew in the flower-cup of life, may linger even after the flower is gathered. quite early on a summer morning, if you look down an ugly street in a busy town, you will scarcely know it. the rows of houses have ceased to look dull, and have become the opposing camps of light and darkness; the street is a tessellated pavement of blue and yellow; the bush that looks so pathetically inadequate by day throws quite a forest of obscurity and becomes mysterious.
the shadow of a tree upon any house blesses it, weaving with its cool, hypnotic gestures a soothing quiet; but the place, of all human habitations, where it best loves to linger is a village street. there each life is framed in garden and orchard; companies of spirit-shapes go trembling up and down the humble walls and roofs all day from the multitude of surrounding leaves; in the highway the sunshine sleeps by the shadow of an ivied wall--disturbed only once in an hour, and then simply turning in its sleep. if those other shades, the troubles of life, have become too dense and shouldered out the light, so that the sick imagination sees them as crouching beasts of prey, a pilgrimage to such a tranquil place in lilac time may help to set things right again. 
the slightly blurred colours of reflections--water-shadows--are more vivid than reality, as if water were a brighter medium than air; what they lose in strength of outline through the motion of the current, they gain in dreamy charm. were ever forget-me-nots half so blue as those that gaze skyward from clear water? did you know all the sweetness of flushed wild-rose faces until you saw them sleeping in a stream? some spell lies on rivers where willows bend over them and transfuse them with tender green, with depths of swaying leaf-reflections, lighter in the centre, where the over-hanging tracery shows the sky, very dark at the sides, where the grassy banks are steep and the leaves thick. 
coming round a curve, you stop with a sudden intake of the breath, dazzled by a blaze of glory. there stands on the bank and there lies in the flood a tree of beaten gold, gently moving against the sky, gently quivering in the water, flinging largess of its yellow money into the vistaed gold of its reflection. the sun makes each leaf transparent, and the whole picture is ardent as the face of some angel of a flaming star. as the spirit strives to gather some of the beauty, it longs to be less finite, less bounded; it desires an infinite future in which to reflect universal loveliness."oh my!
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