OBELISKS. 
217 
within sight of some window in the common sitting parlour; 
because men, at that dead season of the year, are usually within 
doors at the close of the day ; while that for the latter might be 
fixed for any given spot in the garden or outlet : whence the 
owner might contemplate, in a fine summer's evening, the 
utmost extent that the sun makes to the northward at the season 
of the longest days. Now nothing would be necessary but to 
place these two objects with so much exactness, that the westerly 
limb of the sun, at setting, might but just clear the winter helio- 
trope to the west of it on the shortest day ; and that the whole 
disc of the sun, at the longest day, might exactly at setting also 
clear the summer heliotrope to the north of it. 
By this simple expedient it would soon appear that there is 
no such thing, strictly speaking, as a solstice; for, from the 
shortest day, the owner would, every clear evening, see the disc 
advancing, at its setting, to the westward of the object; and, 
from the longest day, observe the sun retiring backwards every 
evening at its setting, towards the object westward, till, in a 
few nights, it would set quite behind it, and so by degrees to 
the west of it : for when the sun comes near the summer solstice, 
the whole disc of it would at first set behind the object ; after a 
time the northern limb would first appear, and so every night 
gradually more, till at length the whole diameter would set 
northward of it for about three nights ; but on the middle night 
of the three, sensibly more remote than the former or following. 
When beginning its recess from the summer tropic, it would 
continue more and more to be hidden every night, till at length 
it would descend quite behind the object again ; and so nightly 
more and more to the westward. 
LETTER XLV. To the Hon. DAINES BARRINGTON. 
Selborne. 
" Mugire videbis 
Sub pedibus terram, et descendere montibus ornos." 
When I was a boy I used to read, with astonishment and im- 
plicit assent, accounts in Baker's Chronicle of walking hills and 
travelling mountains. John Philips, in his Cyder, alludes to the 
credit that was given to such stories with a delicate but quaint 
vein of humour peculiar to the author of the Splendid Shilling. 
