rather than the ear. A deaf man has not only the world of books, but nature herself, for inspirer and comforter; he can, besides, see the forms and faces of those whom he loves. Then he escapes a thousand minute annoyances and interruptions which acute hearing renders inevitable. He loses conversation, of course, and some of the minor voices of nature,—in the summer symphony of the bird's note, the rustle of the breeze, and the hum of insects; he loses music, although if he is a musician he may read music and compose it with an inner sense of its beauty and harmony. And how slight—so the argument runs—are such losses compared with those which blindness brings!
Nevertheless, the real measure of the worth of our senses lies in those early-formed and deeply-seated preferences which have gone to make up our habits and temperaments, and they must be consulted before we can be certain which we might lose—our eyes or our ears—with the least depressing and embittering tendency. It becomes practically a question of two ennuis and which can be the better borne; and this depends on what best satisfies our instincts and stimulates our heart within us,—the beauty of the outside world and its occupations, or table-talk, children's prattle, all the glad voices and utterances of animate things. Both Madame du Deffand and Madame Récamier became blind at the very acme of their careers,—the former almost thirty years before her death, and the latter ten. To neither of these women did her blindness bring the least loss of personal influence; each enjoyed to the end the society of the friends who adored her, who came to tell everything which went on in Paris, to surround her with delicate ministrations, and to delight, soothe, and absorb her with a devotion not only more constant but more ostentatious from the very circumstance of her deprivation. Undoubtedly both these women were saddened to a degree by the fact of their blindness; but compare their position with what it would have been had they been deaf instead. Those brilliant Frenchmen who flocked to their salons would have left their best things unsaid rather than have shouted them through an ear-trumpet, and, although these charming women would no doubt have experienced continued kindness from those nearest them, the cravings of their hearts would have been unanswered, and they would have been pained to the soul by the emptiness, vacancy, and failure of their decline. Harriet Martineau was a strong woman, eager for ideas on political economy and kindred topics, and novel and original ideas of this class can well be proclaimed through an ear-trumpet. She very sensibly put by any feeling of mortification, and was not on the look-out for flippant comments upon her somewhat striking appearance in a London drawing-room, solemnly shouted at in turn by one great man after another on the great questions of the day. Beethoven, on the contrary, fled from society. Commanding genius although he was, and little as could be imparted to him by the prattle of a coterie, he yet missed it, and preferred to remain where he need not be perpetually reminded of his infirmity.
We grant that blindness entails the loss of most essentials of daily useful existence; but blindness once accepted as a fate, there remain many compensations. Other senses put out feelers, as it were, to take the place of sight, and all the instincts are rendered more acute. Deafness is, strange to say, a nervous disease, more wearing to the sufferer than the usual forms of blindness, and, instead of the other faculties becoming more active from the torpidity of the sense of hearing, the brain itself is apt to be confused and benumbed by a sort of permanent congestion which is the result or cause of this disease. The cramping limitations which beset the deaf must be acknowledged,—the loss of sympathy as well, for every one is more or less personally aggrieved at the deafness of another. Let nature and art affect us as they may, it is, after all, the personal, the particular, which gives life its charm, and it is the first
