The haunting, "trembling" image of a lost lover is captured in the form of a shadow on the narrator's chamber wall. It follows him and is a part of him; he both eludes it and longs for it. The shadow grows less afraid as time passes and begins to dance. The narrator reveals the image's identity: his dead lover Adelaide.
The editorial comments in the third issue of The Saturday Press include a listing of the contents of the first issue, attributing "The Shadow on the Wall" to Henry Clapp.
An electronic version of this text was previously available in CONTENTdm and has been migrated to Lehigh University's Digital Collections. Reconstruction of direct links to individual articles is in progress. In the meantime, browse issues of the Saturday Press in the Vault at Pfaff's Digital Collection. Page images of The New York Saturday Press were scanned from microfilm owned by Emory University, which was made from original copies held by the Historical Society of Pennsylvania.