Page:Home Education by Isaac Taylor (1838).djvu/251

 we shall immediately feel that he too has noted a hundred nice shades and aspects of the scene, which not even the poet had discerned. Yet every such technical descriptive phrase notes a real circumstance of a stormy ocean and sky; and each is a circumstance which, after it has once been pointed out to us, we shall ourselves be able, another time, to catch, and which we should regret not to have had the power of observing.

We have not however yet done; for if we go astern, and enter into talk with the old mariner who holds the helm, and get him freely to employ his slang terms in describing a gale of wind, we shall again be met, not merely by a new set of words, but by a new class of observations, so peculiar as not to have been regarded either by the poet or the painter. One step more will lead us as far as we need go in this illustration. Let us then turn to the naturalist, or the man of science, who having acquired those habits of refined observation that are requisite tin pursuing the exact methods of modern science, sees and notes, in the agitated sea and atmosphere, many evanescent indications of the meteorological, the chemical, and the electric changes that are going on, and which had wholly escaped every eye but his own; and these more recondite phenomena he consigns to a technical phraseology, peculiar to science.

And now, if we take the entire compass of phrases employed bythe common observerthe poetthe marine painterthe old sailor, and the man of science, and expunge the few which may be strictly synonymous, or undistinguishable in sense; the copious collection will then constitute a vocabulary corresponding with all the appearances that are cognizable by the human eye, during a sea storm. The set of phrases employed by the first observer embraces only the most obtrusive features of the scene; those introduced by the second, have the effect of extending and refining our conceptions on all sides; and thus in