et clearly, but if we try to number its
grains of dust, we shall find that it is as full of confusion and
doubtful form as anything else; so that there is literally _no_ point of
clear sight, and there never can be. What we call seeing a thing
clearly, is only seeing enough of it to _make out what it is_; this
point of intelligibility varying in distance for different magnitudes
and kinds of things, while the appointed quantity of mystery remains
nearly the same for all. Thus: throwing an open book and an embroidered
handkerchief on a lawn, at a distance of half a mile we cannot tell
which is which; that is the point of mystery for the whole of those
things. They are then merely white spots of indistinct shape. We
approach them, and perceive that one is a book, the other a
handkerchief, but cannot read the one, nor trace the embroidery of the
other. The mystery has ceased to be in the whole things, and has gone
into their details. We go nearer, and can now read the text and trace
the embroidery, but cannot see the fibres of the paper, nor the threads
of the stuff. The mystery has gone into a third place. We take both up
and look closely at them; we see the watermark and the threads, but not
the hills and dales in the paper's surface, nor the fine fibres which
shoot off from every thread. The mystery has gone into a fourth place,
where it must stay, till we take a microscope, which will send it into a
fifth, sixth, hundredth, or thousandth place, according to the power we
use. When, therefore, we say, we see the book _clearly_, we mean only
that we know it is a book. When we say that we see the letters clearly,
we mean that we know what letters they are; and artists feel that they
are drawing objects at a convenient distance when they are so near them
as to know, and to be able in painting to show that they know, what the
objects are, in a tolerably complete manner; but this power does not
depend on any definite distance of the object, but on its size, kind,
and distance, together; so that a small thing in the foreground may be
precisely in the same _phase_ or place of mystery as a large thing far
away.

Sec. 5. The other day, as I was lying down to rest on the side of the hill
round which the Rhone sweeps in its main angle, opposite Martigny, and
looking carefully across the valley to the ridge of the hill which rises
above Martigny itself, then distant about four miles, a plantain
seed-vessel about an inch long, and a