216 LOVERS OF NATURE 



really see the stars'? Probably a great many 

 people never see them at all — that is, never 

 look upon them with any thrill of emotion. If 

 I see them a few times a year, I think myself 

 in luck. If I deliberately go out to see them, 

 I am quite sure to miss them; but occasionally, 

 as one glances up to them in his lonely night 

 walk, the mind opens, or the heaven opens — 

 which is it ? — and he has a momentary glimpse 

 of their ineffable splendor and significance. 

 How overwhelming, how awe-inspiring! His 

 thought goes like a lightning flash into that 

 serene abyss, and then the veil is drawn again. 

 One's science, one's understandmg, tells him 

 he is a voyager on the celestial deep, that the 

 earth beneath his feet is a star among stars, 

 that we can never be any more in the heavens 

 than we are now, or any more within reach of 

 the celestial laws and forces; but how rare the 

 mood in which we can realize this astounding 

 fact, in which we can get a fresh and vivid im- 

 pression of it! To have it ever present with 

 one in all its naked grandeur would perhaps be 

 more than we could bear. 



The common and the familiar — how soon 

 they cease to impress us! The great service of 

 genius, speaking through art and literature, is 

 to pierce through our callousness and indifiference 

 and give us fresh impressions of things as they 

 really are; to present things in new combina- 

 tions, or from new points of view, so that they 

 shall surprise and delight us like a new revela. 

 tion. When poetry does this, or when art does 



