Wallace:  Ben-Hur. 
(Copyright, 1880.  Harper and Bros.)

The house stood unusually near the river, facing eastward, and standing four-square, with an immense veranda about its sides, and a flight of steps in front, spreading broadly downward, as we open our arms to a child. From the veranda nine miles of river were seen; and in their compass near at hand, the shady garden full of rare and beautiful flowers; farther away broad fields of cane and rice, and the distant quarters of the slaves, and on the horizon everywhere a dark belt of cypress forest.

—­Cable:  Old Creole Days.

+122.  Selection of Details Affected by Point of View.+—­A skillful writer will not ask his reader to perform impossible feats.  We cannot see the leaves upon a tree a mile away, and so should not describe them.  The finer effects and more minute details should be included only when our chosen point of view brings us near enough to appreciate them.  In the selection below, Stevenson tells only as much about Swanston cottage as can be seen at a distance of six miles.

So saying she carried me around the battlements towards the opposite or southern side of the fortress and indeed to a bastion almost immediately overlooking the place of our projected flight.  Thence we had a view of some foreshortened suburbs at our feet, and beyond of a green, open, and irregular country rising towards the Pentland Hills.  The face of one of these summits (say two leagues from where we stood) is marked with a procession of white scars.  And to this she directed my attention.

“You see those marks?” she said.  “We call them the Seven Sisters.  Follow a little lower with your eye, and you will see a fold of the hill, the tops of some trees, and a tail of smoke out of the midst of them.  That is Swanston cottage, where my brother and I are living.”

—­Stevenson:  St. Ives. 
(Copyright, 1897.  Charles Scribner’s Sons.)

Notice in the selection below that for objects near at hand details so small as the lizard’s eye are given, but that these details are not given, when we are asked to observe things far away.

Slow though their march had been, by this time they had come to the end of the avenue, and were in the wide circular sweep before the castle. They stopped here and stood looking off over the garden, with its somber cypresses and bright beds of geranium, down upon the valley, dim and luminous in a mist of gold.  Great, heavy, fantastic-shaped clouds, pearl-white with pearl-gray shadows, piled themselves up against the scintillant dark blue of the sky.  In and out among the rose trees near at hand, where the sun was hottest, heavily flew, with a loud bourdonnement, the cockchafers promised by Annunziata,—­big, blundering, clumsy, the scorn of their light-winged and businesslike competitors, the bees.  Lizards lay immobile as lizards cast in bronze, only their little glittering, watchful pin heads of eyes giving sign of life.  And of course the blackcaps never for a moment left off singing.