ared
in life; they look down upon us from our walls; they lie upon our
tables; they rest upon our bosoms; nay, if we will, we may wear their
portraits, like signet-rings, upon our fingers. Our own eyes lose the
images pictured on them. Parents sometimes forget the faces of their own
children in a separation of a year or two. But the unfading artificial
retina which has looked upon them retains their impress, and a fresh
sunbeam lays this on the living nerve as if it were radiated from the
breathing shape. How these shadows last, and how their originals fade
away!

What is true of the faces of our friends is still more true of the
places we have seen and loved. No picture produces an impression on the
imagination to compare with a photographic transcript of the home of our
childhood, or any scene with which we have been long familiar. The very
point which the artist omits, in his effort to produce general effect,
may be exactly the one that individualizes the place most strongly to
our memory. There, for instance, is a photographic view of our own
birthplace, and with it of a part of our good old neighbor's dwelling.
An artist would hardly have noticed a slender, dry, leafless stalk which
traces a faint line, as you may see, along the front of our neighbor's
house next the corner. That would be nothing to him,--but to us it marks
the stem of the _honeysuckle-vine_, which we remember, with its pink
and white heavy-scented blossoms, as long as we remember the stars in
heaven.

To this charm of fidelity in the minutest details the stereoscope adds
its astonishing illusion of solidity, and thus completes the effect
which so entrances the imagination. Perhaps there is also some
half-magnetic effect in the fixing of the eyes on the twin
pictures,--something like Mr. Braid's _hypnotism_, of which many of our
readers have doubtless heard. At least the shutting out of surrounding
objects, and the concentration of the whole attention, which is a
consequence of this, produce a dream-like exaltation of the faculties, a
kind of clairvoyance, in which we seem to leave the body behind us
and sail away into one strange scene after another, like disembodied
spirits.

"Ah, yes," some unimaginative reader may say; "but there is no color and
no motion in these pictures you think so life-like; and at best they are
but petty miniatures of the objects we see in Nature."

But color is, after all, a very secondary quality as compared with f