Too pure and too honest in aught to disguise
The sweet soul shining through them;”
and “eyes that have murder in them, whose flash is the forerunner of thunder.” One has “an eye like Mars, to threaten and command,” and other eyes are “the homes of silent prayer.”
But the variety in color and expression of the eye is as nothing compared to difference in the power of observation. Those ancient companions, “Eyes and No-Eyes,” the story of whose wanderings conveyed a valuable lesson to young and old, were but prototypes of people who go through the world to-day, some of whom see everything, while others see nothing at all. Poets, who could write so beautifully of the eyes, must first have trained their own vision to perceive the beauty or baseness they described, and it is the exercise of this far-seeing, penetrating, analytical power that is the prerogative of genius.
The specialist devotes himself to the closest examination of details. The naturalist does not let the smallest insect escape him, and his trained eye perceives the least peculiarity that denotes the varieties of species.
A person with ordinary eyesight takes up a rose, a lily, or a daisy, and only admires color, shape, or perfume; while the botanist examines the flower in every part, and tells who was its grandfather or grandmother, and feels as tender an interest in it as if it were a human being.
The artist has to train his eye to look for beauty where apparently none appears. He must have an eye for color, for form, for expression, for whatever line he proposes to follow, and he will never rise to eminence if he is satisfied with a hasty, careless, superficial glance.
Turner[1] was one day painting a landscape with the richness of color that was his specialty, when an English girl who was painting near him left her easel and came to look over his shoulder. “Why, Mr. Turner,” said she, “I don’t see any of those colors in the grass or the trees.”
“No?” said Turner. “Don’t you wish you could?”
It is astonishing that with so much of beauty as there is around us, so many people are found who travel through the world without having used their eyes to any profit whatever. The training needs to be begun in early life; children should be taught how to observe; and as some are duller than others they need to have things pointed out to them, until the habit of examining closely becomes fixed, and like second nature.