For Leap Day, what better than a small selection of Lovecraft on the topics of “leaping” and “leaps”…

* “Leaping, floating, flying down those endless stairs…” — “Erich Zann”.

* “Occasionally the things were shewn leaping through open windows at night…” — said of creatures depicted in paintings, in “Pickman’s Model”.

* “The urge to walk was gradually changing to an urge to leap mystically into space, and suddenly he realised just where the source of the pull lay. It was in the sky. A definite point among the stars had a claim on him and was calling him.” — “Dreams in the Witch House”.

* “… little specks of light leaping out one by one till the expanded sea of roofs is one titanic constellation” — Lovecraft describing watching a vista of Providence, slowly sliding from sunset into night.

* “The leap of the cats through space was very swift” — the Cats of Ulthar return from the Moon to the Dreamlands, in “Dream Quest”.

* “And on summer evenings in the twilight he [a kitten] would prove his kinship to the elfin things of shadow by racing across the lawn on nameless errands, darting into the blackness of the shrubbery now & then, & occasionally leaping at me from ambush & then bounding away again into invisibility before I could catch him.” — Lovecraft recalling his beloved childhood cat.

* “art has no parallel for the bewitching grace of the cat’s slightest motion. … whilst the unerring accuracy of his leaping and springing, running and hunting, has an art-value just as high in a more spirited way” — “Cats and Dogs”.