I have often had the remark made to me, “Well, if you have never seen, it is not so bad after all, you have less desire to see.”  This, I think, is a mistake and a poor consolation.  Has the man who has never visited the great Niagara cataract, but has many times heard and read of its wonders, less desire to see it than one who has witnessed those grand displays of God’s power in the flood?  Has the boy who loves to read of travels and strange adventures less desire to see the glaciers of the Alps, the skies of Italy or the jungles of Southern Africa, than the traveler who described them?  However well we may see with our mental vision, however well suited to our taste may be our surroundings, however pleasant may be our family relations, and however kind may be our companions, we cannot help that irrepressible desire to know what there is about light and color, about the indescribable beauty of a sunset, the splendor of an evening sky, the glory of a cloudless day, and the awful grandeur of a storm.  There is yet one thing we greatly desire to know, which the fingers cannot grasp.

We are told in poetry and romance that the human face divine is the index of the spirit.  That its ever changing lines express every mood of the mind and every emotion of the soul, from a smile of ineffable beauty to a midnight frown, from the sunshine of hope, and joy, and gladness, to clouds of wrath and hatred.  That the spirit looks out through the eye and melts you with a beam of tenderness, or pierces your heart with a flash of electric love, or charms you by revealing in its crystal depths the pearl of purity, or transfixes you with a glance of displeasure.  Is all this talk about sunlit faces and starlit eyes, fine sentiment only, or does the face really express feeling as unmistakably as we hear it in voices?  To show that the deaf have as great a desire to hear the music of the human voice as we to see the language of the face, I quote from Dr. Kitto the following touching passages of personal history: 

“Is there anything on earth so engaging to a parent as to catch the first lispings of his infant’s tongue, or so interesting as to listen to its dear prattle, and trace its gradual mastery of speech?  If there be any one thing arising out of my condition, which, more than another, fills my heart with grief, it is this:  it is to see their blessed lips in motion and to hear them not, and to witness others moved to smiles and kisses by the sweet peculiarities of infantile speech which are incommunicable to me, and which pass by me like the idle wind.”