Many critics are like woodpeckers, who, instead of enjoying the fruit and shadow of a tree, hop incessantly around the trunk, pecking holes in the bark to discover some little worm or other.
Alas for the affairs of men! When they are fortunate you might compare them to a shadow; and if they are unfortunate, a wet sponge with one dash wipes the picture away.
I am Providence, and Providence is myself - together, indissolubly as one, we stand thro' the ages; a fixt monument set aeternally in the shadow of Durfee's ice-clad peak!
Beneath the sun's rays our shadow is our comrade;
When clouds obscure the sun our shadow flees.
So Fortune's smiles the fickle crowd pursues,
But swift is gone whenever she veils her face.
Indeed, what forces us at all to suppose that there is an essential opposition of 'true' and 'false'? Is it not sufficient to assume degrees of apparentness and, as it were, lighter and darker shadows and shades of appearance- different 'values', to use the language of painters?