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 caged 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