Things fall for us into a sort of natural perspective
when we see them for a moment in going
By; we generalise boldly and
simply, and are gone before the sun is overcast, before the rain
falls, before the season can steal like a dial-hand from his
figure, before the lights and shadows, shifting round towards
nightfall, can show us the other side of things, and belie what
they showed us in the morning. We expose our mind to the landscape
(as we would expose the prepared plate in the camera) for the
moment only during which the effect endures; and we are away before
the effect can change. Hence we shall have in our memories a long
scroll of continuous wayside pictures, all imbued already with the
prevailing sentiment of the season, the weather and the landscape,
and certain to be unified more and more, as time goes on, by the
unconscious processes of thought. So that we who have only looked
at a country over our shoulder, so to speak, as we went by, will
have a conception of it far more memorable and articulate than a
man who has lived there all his life from a child upwards, and had
his impression of to-day modified by that of to-morrow, and belied
by that of the day after, till at length the stable characteristics
of the country are all blotted out from him behind the confusion of
variable effect.
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