We are near enough to an edifice to see it well, when we can easily read an inscription upon it.  The stereoscopic views of the arches of Constantine and of Titus give not only every letter of the old inscriptions, but render the grain of the stone itself.  On the pediment of the Pantheon may be read, not only the words traced by Agrippa, but a rough inscription above it, scratched or hacked into the stone by some wanton hand during an insurrectionary tumult.

This distinctness of the lesser details of a building or a landscape often gives us incidental truths which interest us more than the central object of the picture.  Here is Alloway Kirk, in the churchyard of which you may read a real story by the side of the ruin that tells of more romantic fiction.  There stands the stone “Erected by James Russell, seedsman, Ayr, in memory of his children,”—­three little boys, James, and Thomas, and John, all snatched away from him in the space of three successive summer-days, and lying under the matted grass in the shadow of the old witch-haunted walls.  It was Burns’s Alloway Kirk we paid for, and we find we have bought a share in the griefs 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.