When the efforts to photograph began, the difficulty was to fix the scene
thrown by the lens upon the plate. There the view appeared perfect to the
least of details, worked out by the sun, and made as complete in
miniature as that he shone upon in nature. But it faded like the shadows
as the summer sun declines. Have you watched them in the fields among the
flowers?--the deep strong mark of the noonday shadow of a tree such as
the pen makes drawn heavily on the paper; gradually it loses its darkness
and becomes paler and thinner at the edge as it lengthens and spreads,
till shadow and grass mingle together. Image after image faded from the
plates, no more to be fixed than the reflection in water of the trees by
the shore. Memory, like the sun, paints to me bright pictures of the
golden summer time of lotus; I can see them, but how shall I fix them for
you? By no process can that be accomplished. It is like a story that
cannot be told because he who knows it is tongue-tied and dumb. Motions
of hands, wavings and gestures, rudely convey the framework, but the
finish is not there.

To-day, and day after day, fresh pictures are coloured instantaneously in
the retina as bright and perfect in detail and hue. This very power is
often, I think, the cause of pain to me. To see so clearly is to value so
highly and to feel too deeply. The smallest of the pencilled branches of
the bare ash-tree drawn distinctly against the winter sky, waving lines
one within the other, yet following and partly parallel, reproducing in
the curve of the twig the curve of the great trunk; is it not a pleasure
to trace each to its ending? The raindrops as they slide from leaf to
leaf in June, the balmy shower that reperfumes each wild flower and green
thing, drops lit with the sun, and falling to the chorus of the refreshed
birds; is not this beautiful to see? On the grasses tall and heavy the
purplish blue pollen, a shimmering dust, sown broadcast over the ripening
meadow from July's warm hand--the bluish pollen, the lilac pollen of the