IS IT MORE TO LOSE THE EYES THAN THE EARS?
Reading edition
(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?
But, as it is, enough renowned have arisen from our ranks to prove that, while blindness fetters the hands and the feet, it verily adds wings to thought. Indeed, the world has but one Homer, who sits forever shrouded in darkness, the veiled god and father of song; and but one Milton, who gave to the world its "Paradise Lost" and its "Paradise Regained," while he bequeathed to the blind of all ages the glory and the beacon light of his name.