vely lilacs and russets. Had he moved freely
about he would have become aware that a fanlike arrangement of
sharply convergent lines, tempting his eye to run rapidly into their
various angles, must be thought of as a chessboard of dikes, hedges,
and roads, dull as if drawn with a ruler on a slate. Also that the
foothills, instead of forming a monumental mass with the mountains
behind them, lay in a totally different plane and distracted the
attention by their aggressive projection. While, as if to spoil the
aspect still more, he would have been forced to recognise (as Ruskin
explains by his drawing of the cottage roof and the Matterhorn peak)
that the exquisitely phrased skyline of the furthermost hills, picked
up at rhythmical intervals into sharp crests, dropping down merely
to rush up again in long concave curves, was merely an illusion of
perspective, nearer lines seeming higher and further ones lower, let
alone that from a balloon you would see only flattened mounds. But
to how things might look from a balloon, or under a microscope,
that man did not give one thought, any more than to how they might
look after a hundred years of tramways and funiculars or how they
had looked before thousands of years of volcanic and glacial action.
He was satisfied with the wonderfully harmonised scheme of light
and colour, the pattern (more and more detailed, more and more
co-ordinated with every additional exploring glance) of keenly
thrusting, delicately yielding lines, meeting as purposefully as if
they had all been alive and executing some great, intricate dance. He
did not concern himself whether what he was looking at was an
aggregate of things; still less what might be these things' other
properties. He was not concerned with things at all, but only with a
particular appearance (he did not care whether it answered to reality),
only with one (he did not want to know whether there might be any
other) _aspect._

For, odd as it may sound, a _Thing_ is both much more and much
less than an _Aspect._ Much more, because a _Thing_ really means
not only qualities of its own and reactions of ours which are actual
and present, but a far greater number and variety thereof which are
potential. Much _less,_ on the other hand, because of these potential
qualities and reactions constituting a Thing only a minimum need be
thought of at any given time; instead of which, an aspect is all there,
its qualities closely interdependent, and our re