aged tiger, and on the scaly train of the
crocodile, stretched on the sands of the river that has mirrored a
hundred dynasties. I stroll through Rhenish vineyards, I sit under Roman
arches, I walk the streets of once buried cities, I look into the chasms
of Alpine glaciers, and on the rush of wasteful cataracts. I pass, in
a moment, from the banks of the Charles to the ford of the Jordan, and
leave my outward frame in the arm-chair at my table, while in spirit I
am looking down upon Jerusalem from the Mount of Olives.

"Give me the full tide of life at Charing Cross," said Dr. Johnson. Here
is Charing Cross, but without the full tide of life. A perpetual stream
of figures leaves no definite shapes upon the picture. But on one side
of this stereoscopic doublet a little London "gent" is leaning pensively
against a post; on the other side he is seen sitting at the foot of the
next post;--what is the matter with the little "gent"?

The very things which an artist would leave out, or render imperfectly,
the photograph takes infinite care with, and so makes its illusions
perfect. What is the picture of a drum without the marks on its head
where the beating of the sticks has darkened the parchment? In three
pictures of the Ann Hathaway Cottage, before us,--the most perfect,
perhaps, of all the paper stereographs we have seen,--the door at the
farther end of the cottage is open, and we see the marks left by the
rubbing of hands and shoulders as the good people came through the
entry, or leaned against it, or felt for the latch. It is not impossible
that scales from the epidermis of the trembling hand of Ann Hathaway's
young suitor, Will Shakspeare, are still adherent about the old latch
and door, and that they contribute to the stains we see in our picture.

Among the accidents of life, as delineated in the stereograph, there is
one that rarely fails in any extended view which shows us the details of
streets and buildings. There may be neither man nor beast nor vehicle to
be seen. You may be looking down on a place in such a way that none of
the ordinary marks of its being actually inhabited show themselves. But
in the rawest Western settlement and the oldest Eastern city, in
the midst of the shanties at Pike's Peak and stretching across the
court-yards as you look into them from above the clay-plastered roofs of
Damascus, wherever man lives with any of the decencies of civilization,
you will find the _clothes-line_. It may be