42 HOMEWARDS AFTER DARK. "on that aëry height, Bearing a lantern in her hand, she stood, Or paced the ground—to guide her husband home, SHADOWS. THE shadows of the mind are likened in Hyperion to those of the body: in the morning of life they all lie behind us; at noon we trample them under feet; and in the evening they stretch long, broad, and deepening before us. Mr. de Quincey remembers hearing a great man of his own time declare that no sense of conscious power had ever so vividly dilated his mind, nothing so like a revelation, as when one day, in broad sunshine, whilst yet a child, he discovered that his own shadow, which he had often angrily hunted, was no real existence, but a mere hindering of the sun's light from filling up the space screened by his own body. "The old grudge, which he cherished against this coy fugitive shadow, melted away in the rapture of the great discovery. To him the discovery had doubtless been originally half-suggested by explanations of his elders imperfectly comprehended. But in itself the distinction between the affirmative and the negative is a step perhaps the most costly in effort of any that the human mind is summoned to make."* Locke, in one of his chapters on simple ideas, appeals to every * De Quincey, Philosophy of Herodotus, § I. 44 SHADOWS IN DANTE, DRYDEN, SWIFT, one's experience, whether the shadow of a man, though it consists of nothing but the absence of light (and the more the absence of light is, the more discernible is the shadow), does not, when a man looks on it, cause as clear and positive idea in his mind, as a man himself, though covered over with a clear sunshine? "and the picture of a shadow is a positive thing," he adds. marvel at seeing the shadow cast by the body of Dante on the flame as he passes it: The spirits in Purgatory "My passing shadow made the umber'd flame 'He seems,' said they, 'no unsubstantial frame."" Shadows, says Dryden, are but privations of the light; "yet, when we walk, they shoot before the sight: with us approach, retire, arise and fall; nothing themselves, and yet expressing all." Swift's riddle on a shadow in a glass expands the theme: "By something formed, I nothing am:" "in no place have I ever been, yet everywhere I may be seen," etc.,— though here, of course, the shadow is altogether of a different texture and essence. Locus est et pluribus umbris. The light is perhaps never felt more strongly as a Divine presence, George Eliot observes,―stirring all those inarticulate sensibilities which are our deepest life, than in those moments when it instantaneously GEORGE ELIOT, HAWTHORNE. 45 awakens the shadows. The remark is made in reference to Romola wending her way from Florence and its ties, on a bare wintry morning,-the scene one of leafless trees and sombre hills,-when presently the light burst forth with sudden strength, and shadows were thrown across the road, and it seemed that the sun was going to chase away the greyness. “A certain awe, which inevitably accompanied this most momentous act of her life, became a more conscious element in Romola's feeling as she found herself in the sudden presence of the impalpable golden glory, and the long shadow of herself that was not to be escaped." For some moments she is to be seen looking at nothing but the brightness on the path, and at her own shadow, tall and shrouded like a dread spectre. At the close of the impassioned interview between Zenobia and Hollingsworth in The Blithedale Romance, "Methought," says the romancer, "as the declining sun threw Zenobia's magnified shadow along the path, I beheld it tremulous." The author pelts his own shadow with pebbles, in his seashore fantasy, when he sees it in the departing sunshine with its head upon the sea, and exults in what Osrick would pronounce "a hit, a very palpable hit!" And he claps his hands in triumph, and sees his shadow clapping its unreal hands, and claiming the triumph for itself. "What a simpleton must I have been all day, since my own shadow makes a mock of my fooleries." Mr. Hawthorne was the very man to discourse on 46 ४ SHADOWS IN TRANSFORMATION? shadows, and one almost wonders he has not made more of them in his shadowy stories and sketches, first and last. In Transformation they do, indeed, come like themselves and so depart. "Three shadows!" exclaims Miriam, by moonshine, as she leans over the stone-brim of the fountain's basin, the Fountain of Trevi,-"three separate shadows, all so black and heavy that they sink in the water." Her own is one. There they lie on the bottom, as if all three were drowned together. The shadow on her right is Donatello; him she knows by his curls, and the turn of his head. But her left hand companion perplexes her; a shapeless mass, as indistinct as the premonition of calamity. And such a premonition that blurred shadow too assuredly is. Chapter after chapter it is the same sad story; wherever she goes she finds her Shadow go too; if she passes into a house for a visit, when she comes out she finds her Shadow waiting for her in the street. In that fountain scene she is in the mood to echo the utterance of Shakspeare's Gloster: Shadows to-night Have struck more terror to the soul of Richard, Shadows in Shakspeare, as in nature, are of all sorts, grave and gay, definite and indefinite. Now we have Malvolio yonder in the sun, practising behaviour to his own shadow, this half-hour: "observe him, |