Page:Home Education by Isaac Taylor (1838).djvu/250

 but expressions of the highly refined perceptions of the most gifted and sensitive minds: and these very perceptions, unheeded by the generality of men, are, through the medium of the terms employed to convey them, brought within the range of allare forced upon the notice of all.

It is as when two persons, very unequally gifted as to their powers of observation, are travelling together; for the more observant of the two is every moment jogging the elbow of his obtuse companion, and directing his eye, on the right and the left, to many forms of beauty bid by himself, he would have disregarded.

And thus again, there is another set of descriptive terms, expressing those partial, and yet very nice perceptions which result from the avocations and mechanical employments of different classes of men. These technical words (and the amount of them is very great, and their significance very remarkable) although they may not ordinarily be available in writing or discourse, are worthy of attention when considered as records, or notations, of the sensible qualities of things. We might take, for an example, the description of the sea and sky in a storm, which would be given by a landsman, of ordinary sensibility, and ordinary acquaintance with language; and which would well enough convey a general idea of the scene, in its broader features. But next, let us ask the poet, whose eye has a peculiar regard to the sublime and beautiful, and whose vocabulary contains a far more extensive assortment of terms, to take up the same theme; and we shall find that he not merely associates many fine sentiments with the natural objects before him, but that he has observed and noted many circumstances of the scene that had altogether escaped the vulgar eye:in fact he has seen, what the other saw not. Yet this is not enough; for we must next call in the painterthe marine painter, and if he possess a tolerable command of languagethe technical language of his art,