Thy touch gives the lily its whiteness, the rose its tint, and thy kindling ray makes the diamond’s light.  Thy beams are mighty as the power that binds the spheres.  Thou canst change the sleety winds to soothing zephyrs, and thou canst melt the icy mountains of the poles to gentle rains and dewy vapors.  The granite rocks of the hills are upturned by thee, volcanoes burst, islands sink and rise, rivers roll and oceans swell at thy look of command.  And oh! thou monarch of the skies, bend now thy bow of millioned arrows, and pierce, if thou canst, this darkness that thrice twelve moons has bound me.

Burst now thy emerald gates, O Morn, and let thy dawnings come!  Mine eyes roll in vain to find thee, and my soul is weary of this interminable gloom.  The past comes back robed in a pall which makes all things dark.  The present blotted out, and the future but a rayless, hopeless, loveless night of years, my heart is but the tomb of blighted hopes, and all the misery of feelings unemployed has settled on me.  I am misfortune’s child and sorrow long since marked me for her own.

IS IT MORE TO LOSE THE EYES THAN THE EARS?

(From Mrs. De Kroyft’s forthcoming work, entitled “My Soul and I.”)

Ah no! dark and empty and lonely as the world may be to us, no intelligent blind person could be found who would exchange hearing, and its attendant gift of speech, for a pair of the brightest eyes in the world; while, for myself, I have sometimes even wondered if, after all, it be, in the strictest sense of the word, a misfortune not to see.

All of our other senses are certainly not only immeasurably quickened, but is not our whole nature improved, and our immortal being greatly elevated through this darkest of human privations?

Just imagine for a moment a touch like Cynthia Bullock’s, so exquisite as to feel with ease the notes, lines and spaces of ordinary printed music; then add to that a hearing that almost notes the budding of the flowers, and you will see how little one must possibly lack, even in the scale of pleasurable existence, while perception in us becomes verily a new sense.  Indeed, what shade of thought or feeling ever escapes us?  Almost quicker than a thing has been uttered we have felt or perceived it.  What marvelous power, too, memory comes to possess, and how tenaciously she clings to everything, often astonishing even to ourselves; while imagination, that loftiest and most winged attribute of the soul, not only becomes more fleet, but literally turns creator, reproducing before our spirit eyes not only all that we have lost, clothed in the beautiful ideal, but unbars the gates to every new field of intellectual research, often enabling us to compete even more than successfully with those who see.

Alas! if there could be only a seat of learning for the blind, with all its lessons oral or in the form of lectures, as at most of the German Universities, what could we not achieve?