348

THE UrPEK EHINE GOBGE.

and treatises have, in later times, been written to teach us"liow to observe," or, literally, how to use our eyes; f'orverily sigbt is an acquired sense, and the eye lias to be"educated," as Burnet calls it, as much as the hand, inorder to be skilful. But tbere is a higher ocular educationthan learning to perceive visual distance, and to know the con-nexion between the figure feit and the figure seen; or highereven than that, which teaches us to judge between minutedifferences of tint, and attunes the organ to so fine a sense ofchromatic harmony, that some colours seem to have a verynielody in their juxtaposition, while others appear to jar, asit were, upon the eye. This higher art is that of seeingthe unseen, so that the tiny photograph, painted on theretina, shall be something more to us than the picture atthe back of the camera; for it is merely the vision of theinvisible which makes the firmament appear so different in theeyes of the astronomer and the vulgär. To the organ of aHerschel the starry crowd is no longer a confused mass ofglittering atoms, as indistinguishable one from another as aswarm of fire-flies twinkling in the dusk; but every littlespeck of light in the heavens is like some old familiär face,and the various forms of the constellations, mentally, as dis-tinct as the several parts of some fairy landscape, traced bythe sparkling frost-work on the window-pane. The little pole-star, that to the uninformed eye is but a mere jack-o'-lanternshining always in the north, is, to scientific vision, notonly the brilliant jewel upon which the exquisite clock-workof the heavens seems to turn, but another globe, millions ofmiles away, the very light froin which requires hundreds ofyears to reach us; so that the blue vault above seems to suchan organ no longer as a simple canopy of air and clouds, but avast illimitable ocean of space, with worlds strewn thick as sandupon its endlcss shores: even as the wandering lights, called