Lazy and indifferent, shaking space easily from his wings, knowing his way, the heron passes over the church beneath the sky. White and distant, absorbed in itself, endlessly the sky covers and uncovers, moves and remains. A lake? Blot the shores of it out A mountain? Oh, perfect--the sun gold on its slopes. Down that falls. Ferns then, or white feathers, for ever and ever...

Virginia Woolf, an English writer, one of the foremost modernist literary figures of the twentieth century. Woolf was a significant figure in London literary society and a member of the Bloomsbury Group, an enormously influential gathering of English writers, intellectuals, philosophers and artists. Their works and views deeply influenced literature, aesthetics, criticism, economics, and modern values and attitudes.