erely deny themselves. The persons who can say that they have seen a
total eclipse of the sun are those who rely upon their eyes. My aids,
who touched no glasses, had a season of rare enjoyment. They saw
Mercury, with its gleam of white light, and Mars, with its ruddy glow;
they saw Regulus come out of the darkening blue on one side of the sun,
Venus shimmer and Procyon twinkle near the horizon, and Arcturus shine
down from the zenith.

"_We_ saw the giant shadow as it _left_ us and passed over the lands of
the untutored Indian; _they_ saw it as it approached from the distant
west, as it fell upon the peaks of the mountain-tops, and, in the
impressive stillness, moved directly for our camping-ground.

"The savage, to whom it is the frowning of the Great Spirit, is
awe-struck and alarmed; the scholar, to whom it is a token of the
inviolability of law, is serious and reverent.

"There is a dialogue in some of the old school-readers, and perhaps in
some of the new, between a tutor and his two pupils who had been out for
a walk. One pupil complained that the way was long, the road was dusty,
and the scenery uninteresting; the other was full of delight at the
beauties he had found in the same walk. One had walked with his eyes
intellectually closed; the other had opened his eyes wide to all the
charms of nature. In some respects we are all, at different times, like
each of these boys: we shut our eyes to the enjoyments of nature, or we
open them. But we are capable of improving ourselves, even in the use of
our eyes--we see most when we are most determined to see. The _will_ has
a wonderful effect upon the perceptive faculties. When we first look up
at the myriads of stars seen in a moonless evening, all is confusion to
us; we admire their brilliancy, but we scarcely recognize their
grouping. We do not feel the need of knowing much about them.

"A traveller, lost on a desert plain, feels that the recognition of one
star, the Pole star, is of itself a great acquisition; and all persons
who, like mariners and soldiers, are left much with the companionship of
the stars, only learn to know the prominent clusters, even if they do
not know the names given to them in books.

"The daily wants of the body do not require that we should say

"'Give me the ways of wandering stars to know
The depths of heaven above and earth below.'

But we have a hunger of the mind which asks for knowledge of all around
us, and the more we