It was something like the "camera-obscura" on Ramsgate pier: one goes
in and finds one's self in total darkness; the eye is prepared; one is
thoroughly expectant and wide-awake.

Suddenly there flashes on the sight the moving picture of the port and
all the life therein, and the houses and cliffs beyond; and farther
still the green hills, the white clouds, and blue sky.

Little green waves chase each other in the harbor, breaking into crisp
white foam. Sea-gulls wheel and dash and dip behind masts and ropes and
pulleys; shiny brass fittings on gangway and compass flash in the sun
without dazzling the eye; gay Liliputians walk and talk, their white
teeth, no bigger than a pin's point, gleam in laughter, with never a
sound; a steamboat laden with excursionists comes in, its paddles
churning the water, and you cannot hear them. Not a detail is
missed--not a button on a sailor's jacket, not a hair on his face. All
the light and color of sea and earth and sky, that serve for many a
mile, are here concentrated within a few square feet. And what color it
is! A painter's despair! It is light itself, more beautiful than that
which streams through old church windows of stained glass. And all is
framed in utter darkness, so that the fully dilated pupils can see their
very utmost. It seems as though all had been painted life-size and then
shrunk, like a Japanese picture on crape, to a millionth of its natural
size, so as to intensify and mellow the effect.

It is all over: you come out into the open sunshine, and all seems
garish and bare and bald and commonplace. All magic has faded out of
the scene; everything is too far away from everything else; everybody
one meets seems coarse and Brobdingnagian and too near. And one has been