riefs of James Russell,
seedsman; for is not the stone that tells this blinding sorrow of real
life the true centre of the picture, and not the roofless pile which
reminds us of an idle legend?

We have often found these incidental glimpses of life and death running
away with us from the main object the picture was meant to delineate.
The more evidently accidental their introduction, the more trivial they
are in themselves, the more they take hold of the imagination. It is
common to find an object in one of the twin pictures which we miss in
the other; the person or the vehicle having moved in the interval of
taking the two photographs. There is before us a view of the Pool of
David at Hebron, in which a shadowy figure appears at the water's edge,
in the right-hand farther corner of the right-hand picture only. This
muffled shape stealing silently into the solemn scene has already
written a hundred biographies in our imagination. In the lovely glass
stereograph of the Lake of Brienz, on the left-hand side, a vaguely
hinted female figure stands by the margin of the fair water; on the
other side of the picture she is not seen. This is life; we seem to see
her come and go. All the longings, passions, experiences, possibilities
of womanhood animate that gliding shadow which has flitted through our
consciousness, nameless, dateless, featureless, yet more profoundly
real than the sharpest of portraits traced by a human hand. Here is
the Fountain of the Ogre, at Berne. In the right picture two women are
chatting, with arms akimbo, over its basin; before the plate for the
left picture is got ready, "one shall be taken and the other left";
look! on the left side there is but one woman, and you may see the blur
where the other is melting into thin air as she fades forever from your
eyes.

Oh, infinite volumes of poems that I treasure in this small library of
glass and pasteboard! I creep over the vast features of Rameses, on the
face of his rock-hewn Nubian temple; I scale the huge mountain-crystal
that calls itself the Pyramid of Cheops. I pace the length of the three
Titanic stones of the wall of Baalbee,--mightiest masses of quarried
rock that man has lifted into the air; and then I dive into some mass
of foliage with my microscope, and trace the veinings of a leaf so
delicately wrought in the painting not made with hands, that I can
almost see its down and the green aphis that sucks its juices. I
look into the eyes of the c