If A Carpet Were Copied From It, And Laid Down In A
Room, The Design Would Want To Run Through The Walls.
Imagine the
flower-bird's wing detached from some immense unseen carpet and set
floating - it is a piece of something not ended in itself, and yet
floating about complete.
Some of their wings are neatly cut to an edge
and bordered; of some the edge is lost in colour, because no line is
drawn along it. Some seem to have ragged edges naturally, and look as if
they had been battered. Towards the end of their lives little bits of the
wing drop out, as if punched. The markings on the under wings have a
tendency to run into arches, one arch above the other. The tendency to
curve may be traced everywhere in things as wide apart as a flower-bird's
wing and the lines on a scallop-shell.
I own to a boyish pleasure in seeing the clouds of brown chafers in early
summer clustering on the maple hedges and keeping up a continual burring.
They stick to the fingers like the bud of a horse-chestnut. Now the fern
owl pitches himself over the oaks in the evening as a boy might throw a
ball careless whither it goes; the next moment he comes up out of the
earth under your feet. The night cuckoo might make another of his many
names; his colour, ways, and food are all cuckoo-like; so, too, his
immense gape - a cave in which endless moths end their lives; the eggs are
laid on the ground, for there is no night-feeding bird into whose nest
they could be put, else, perhaps, they would be.
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