figures or landscapes of a
camera obscura without forming the wish that, among the hidden
secrets of matter, some means might be discovered for fixing and
rendering them permanent. If nature could be made her own limner, if
by some magic art the reflection could be fixed upon the mirror, could
the picture be other than true? But the wish must have seemed an idle
one,--a wish of nearly the same cast as those which all remember to
have formed at one happy period of life, in connection with the famous
cap and purse of the fairy tale. Could aught seem less probable than
that the forms of the external world should be made to convert the
pencils of light which they emit into real _bona fide_ pencils, and
commence taking their own likenesses? Improbable as the thing may have
seemed, however, there were powers in nature of potency enough to
effect it, and the newly discovered art of the photographer is
simply the art of employing these. The figures and landscapes of the
camera obscura can now be fixed and rendered permanent,--not yet in
all their various shades of colour, but in a style scarce less
striking, and to which the limner, as if by anticipation, has already
had recourse. The connoisseur unacquainted with the results of the
recent discovery, would decide, if shown a set of photographic
impressions, that he had before him the carefully finished drawings
in sepia of some great master. The stronger lights, as in sketches done
in this colour, present merely the white ground of the paper; a tinge
of soft warm brown indicates the lights of lower tone; a deeper and
still deeper tinge succeeds, shading by scarce perceptible degrees
through all the various gradations, until the darker shades concentrate
into an opaque and dingy umber, that almost rivals black in its
intensity. We have at the present moment before us--and very wonderful
things they certainly are--drawings on which a human pencil was never
employed. They are strangely suggestive of the capabilities of the
art. Here, for instance, is a scene in George Street,--part of the
pavement; and a line of buildings, from the stately erection at the
corner of Hanover Street, with its proud Corinthian columns and rich
cornice, to Melville's Monument and the houses which form the eastern
side of St. Andrew Square. St. Andrew's Church rises in the middle
distance. The drawing is truth itself; but there are cases in which
mere truth might be no great merit: were the truth restric