Dis] AND SYMBOLS. 91 



The Delusive Effects of Distance. 



Not un frequently we discover that the distance between a 

 friend and ourselves has caused us to take an entirely wrong 

 view of him and his proceedings. We contemplate him through 

 a medium which is illusory. When we approach near, however, 

 we see the reality to be the reverse of what it appeared. Now 

 in like manner a natural object of the landscape, when seen 

 from a distance, may appear to the eye to be in a state exactly 

 the reverse of what it really is. Who does not acknowledge 

 instantaneously the magical truth of Wordsworth's saying of a 

 cataract, seen from a station two miles off, that it was "frozen 

 by distance." It looks all ice. In all Nature, however, there 

 is not an object so essentially at war with the stiffening of a 

 frost, as the headlong and desperate life of a cataract, and yet 

 notoriously the effect of distance is to lock tip this frenzy of 

 motion into the most petrific column of stillness. Such is the 

 illusory effect of distance. DE Q. 



The Illusions of Distance. 



The three bright stars which constitute the girdle or bands of 

 Orion never change their form ; they preserve the same relative 

 position to each other, and to the rest of the constellation, from 

 year to year and age to age. And yet in the profound rest 

 of these stars there is a ceaseless motion, in their apparent 

 stability and everlasting endurance there is constant change. 

 In vast courses with inconceivable velocities, they are whirling 

 round invisible centres and ever shifting their positions in space, 

 and ever passing into new collocations. They appear to us 

 motionless and changeless because of our great distance from 

 them. B. 



Distinctiveness. 



Every blade of grass, leaf, flower, tree, or animal, has dis- 

 tinctiveness. No two things of the same sort can be found 

 exactly alike. Mr. Dixon remarks that even " to every hen 

 belongs an individual peculiarity in the form, colour, and size 

 of her egg, which never changes during her lifetime, so long as 



