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An honestly mechanical reader soon rubs his eyes with bewilderment at the orgy of ambiguity to which he is introduced. Every term in Spencer's fireworks shimmers through a whole spectrum of meanings in order to adapt itself to the successive spheres of evolution to which it must apply. "Integration," for instance.

It poured in through four great windows, peaceful and diaphanous, a pale blue mist of moonlight, and turned the huge room into a kind of submarine cave, paved with moonbeams, full of shimmers, of pools of moonlight. It was as bright as at midday, but the brightness was cold, blue, vaporous, supernatural. The room was completely empty, like a great hayloft.

It has a magic of its own the bedroom fire. Not such a one as night by night warms hothouse bedrooms of the rich, but that which burns but once or twice a year. How the coals glow between the bars, how the red light shimmers on the black-lead bricks, how the posset steams upon the hob!

In the little portico east of Independence Hall the gas lamp under the ceiling cast a soft pink glow on the brick columns. Independence Square was a sea of tremulous, dripping boughs. The quaint heptahedral lamps threw splashed shimmers of topaz colour across the laky pavement. "Golden lamps in a green night," as Marvell says, twinkled through the stir and moisture of the evening.

"See how the moonlight shimmers on the tiny waves." Heavy and low from the westward came an ominous growl of thunder. "Yes. An' there'll be somethin' besides moonlight a-shimmerin' around here directly. That ain't exactly a lake. It's Johnson's irrigation reservoir. If we could get about ten miles below here before the storm hits, we can hole up in a rock cave 'til she blows over.

"Where the heifers browse where geese nip their food with short jerks; Where sundown shadows lengthen over the limitless and lonesome prairie; Where herds of buffalo make a crawling spread of the square miles far and near; Where the hummingbird shimmers where the neck of the long-lived swan is curving and winding; Where the laughing-gull scoots by the shore when she laughs her near human laugh; Where band-neck'd partridges roost in a ring on the ground with their heads out."

Nearer by, the picturesque rocky shores of the island of Capri seem to pulsate through the dreamy, shifting mists that veil its sides; and the sea shimmers and glitters like the neck of a peacock with an iridescent mingling of colors: the whole air is a glorifying medium, rich in prismatic hues of enchantment.

The brook runs below. Alders and ash, bending forward on either bank, mingle their branches and form a verdant arch. At their feet, behind a porch of great twisted roots, are watery caverns prolonged by gloomy corridors. On the threshold of these fastnesses shimmers a glint of sunshine, cut into ovals by the leafy sieve above. This is the haunt of the red-necktied minnows.

Even now sitting in a pleasant room, with windows opening down on a trim lawn studded with flower-jewels and girdled with the mottled belts of velvet-green that are the glory of Devonion shrub-land, beyond which Tobray shimmers broad and blue under the breezy summer weather I shrink from it with a strange reluctance that I cannot, shake off, though it shames me.

And ever upon the night of that sixteenth day whether the sea be calm or tumultuous all its surface shimmers with faint lights gliding out to the open, the dim fires of the dead; and there is heard a murmuring of voices, like the murmur of a city far-off, the indistinguishable speech of souls.