"Yes, Miss Earl, I see it now. The eye could travel up and up, and on and on, and never get out of the sky; and it seems to me those birds yonder would fly entirely away, out of sight, through that air in the picture. But, Miss Earl, do you really believe that the Chimborazo in South America is as grand as Mr. Church's? I do not, because I have noticed that pictures are much handsomer than the real things they stand for. Mamma carried me last spring to see some paintings of scenes on the Hudson River, and when we went travelling in the summer, I saw the very spot where the artist stood when he sketched the hills and the bend of the river, and it was not half so pretty as the picture. And yet I know God is the greatest painter. Is it the far-off look that everything wears when painted. "Yes, the 'far-off look,' as you call it, is one cause of the effect you wish to understand; and it has been rather more elegantly expressed by Campbell, in the line: ''Tis distance lends enchantment to the view.' I have seen this fact exemplified in a very singular manner, at a house in Georgia, where I was once visiting. From the front door I had a very fine prospect or view of lofty hills, and a dense forest, and a pretty little town where the steeples of the churches glittered in the sunshine, and I stood for some time admiring the landscape; but presently, when I turned to speak to the lady of the house, I saw, in the glass sidelights of the door, a miniature reflection of the very same scene that was much more beautiful. I was puzzled, and could not comprehend how the mere fact of diminishing the size of the various objects, by increasing the distance, could enhance their loveliness; and I asked myself whether all far-off things were handsomer than those close at hand? In my perplexity I went as usual to Mr. Ruskin, wondering whether he had ever noticed the same thing; and of course he had, and has a noble passage about it in one of his books on architecture. I will see if my memory appreciates it as it deserves: 'Are not all natural things, it may be asked, as lovely near as far away? Nay, not so. Look at the clouds, and watch the delicate sculpture of their alabaster sides and the rounded lustre of their magnificent rolling. They are meant to be beheld far away; they were shaped for this place, high above your head; approach them, and they fuse into vague mists, or whirl away in fierce fragments of thunderous vapors.' (And here, Felix, your question about Chimborazo is answered.) 'Look at the crest of the Alps, from the far-away plains over which its light is cast, whence human souls have communion with it by their myriads. The child looks up to it in the dawn, and the husbandman in the burden and heat of the day, and the old man in the going down of the sun, and it is to them all as the celestial city on the world's horizon; dyed with the depths of heaven and clothed with the calm of eternity. There was