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Ballet of squares.

"December

From the sad leaves withdrawn,
Remote, estranged and cold,
Forgetful autumn's gold
Alone abides in some December dawn.

Tearless and clear and chill
As eyes that have forgot
Far love, or find it not,
The pale bright heavens arch the barren hill.

Now, in this afternoon
Enchanted, blue and brief,
The year has lost its grief
In valleys mute below the spectral moon.

For here no mourning-dove
Laments the season flown:
On love that wanders lone
Falls the blue balm of silence from above.

For here no zephyr grieves
To tell the year's dead dream;
And down the pine-lulled stream
Lost memories drift and loiter with the leaves."

--Clark Ashton Smith

Revolving unfolding rose.

"She often looked with compassion, at such a time, upon the stragglers who came wandering into London, by the great highway hard by, and who, footsore and weary, and gazing fearfully at the huge town before them, as if foreboding that their misery there would be but as a drop of water in the sea, or as a grain of sea-sand on the shore, went shrinking on, cowering before the angry weather, and looking as if the very elements rejected them. Day after day, such travellers crept past, but always, as she thought, in one direction--always towards the town. Swallowed up in one phase or another of its immensity, towards which they seemed impelled by a desperate fascination, they never returned. Food for the hospitals, the churchyards, the prisons, the river, fever, madness, vice, and death,--they passed on to the monster, roaring in the distance, and were lost." --Dombey and Son

Winter Evening in Holland.