SYMPATHY NECESSARY TO THE SPEAKER. 225

them feel the theme and himself. He pursues the line of his thought; a sentence is dropped which falls like a kindling spark into the breast of some one present. The light of that spark shoots up to his eyes, and sends an answer to the speaker. The telegraphic signal is felt, and the speaker is instantly tenfold the stronger; he believes what he is saying more deeply than before, when a second sentence creates a response in another part of the house. As he proceeds the listless are arrested, the lethargic are startled into attention, tokens of sympathy and emotion flash out upon him from every portion of the audience. That audience has lent to him its strength. It is the same double action which characterizes every movement of the universe; action and re-action; the speaker giving the best that is in him to his hearers, they lending the divinest portion of themselves to him. This tidal movement of sympathy, this magnetic action, awakening and answering in the eyes of speaker and hearer, by which he is filled with their life, and they pervaded by his thought, is to me the secret and the condition of real eloquence and clearly this condition is one unattainable by a man destitute of sight.

His audience may yield him their deepest, holiest sympathies; yet how can he be made aware of this? Between himself and them a great gulf is fixed, over which no man may pass. His discourse is a soliloquy spoken to his own ear. His imagination the only gage which he possesses of the appreciativeness of his audience. His words may be beneath them, or above them; his thoughts may be lofty, almost divine; his convictions may reach to the very roots of his being; his voice may be sweet as thrilling music, and yet, so far as the last and highest requisite of eloquence is concerned, he might as well be speaking to the trees. His audience is not a reality, but only the product of his imagination. He is wholly incompetent to appreciate or receive any sympathetic response which they may be disposed to render him. Such inspiration as he may have is the influence of his subject upon his own mind and heart. The answer of the human eye, the mightiest quickener of eloquence, is forever withholden from him.Therefore, I have said that this sphere of power and distinction is shut up against him. The blind may achieve the laurel of the poet, the fame of the historian, but his hand can

never wield the wand of enchantment which is given to the great orator.

Cheerfully do I turn me now to look upon some of the compensations which underlie and bless the lot of those who sit in darkness. Forlorn, indeed, and wretched, does their state at first sight seem. Shut out from vision of mountains and oceans, without a message from sun or star; cheered by no pleasant sight of corn-fields, or meadows dotted with flocks and herds; unused to the dreamy twilight of the deep forest, or the silvery gleam of the brook as it breaks into sunshine; untaught in any alphabet by which to interpret the craft of the builder or the miracles of painting or sculpture, the condition of the blind seems dreary and dismal enough-quite enough to justify the pathetic recital of Milton:

"Thus with the year

Seasons return; but not to me returns
Day, or the sweet approach of even or morn,
Or sight of vernal bloom, or summer's rose,
Or flocks, or herds, or human face divine.
But cloud instead, and everduring dark
Surrounds me, from the cheerful ways of men
Cut off, and for the book of knowledge fair,
Presented with a universal blank

Of nature's works, to me expunged and raised,
And wisdom at one entrance quite shut out."

I have already had occasion to hint at the exquisite training imparted to the other senses, by reason of the absence of this princely one; the delicacy of the touch, amounting almost to the development of another sense, so quick do the nerves become in their apprehension of forms and distances. But the balance of faculties is maintained chiefly through the ear; and, upon reflection is it not through this organ that the largest contributions to happiness are made from without? Wordsworth has declared the capabilities of the ear, in lines as philosophically accurate in their analysis, as their measure is poetically beautiful:

"Thy functions are ethereal,

As if within thee dwelt a glancing mind,
Organ of vision! and a spirit aerial

Informs the cell of hearing, dark and blind,
Intricate labyrinth, more dread for thought
To enter, than oracular cave;

Strict passage, through which sighs are brought,
And whispers, for the heart, their slave

* and warbled air,

Whose piercing sweetness can unloose

The chains of frenzy, or entice a smile
Into the ambush of despair;

Hosannas pealing down the long drawn aisle,

And requiems answered by the pulse that beats
Devoutly, in life's last retreats.

THE BLIND MAN'S NEED IS HIS GAIN.

Blest be the song that brightens

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The blind man's gloom, exalts the veteran's mirth; Nor scorned the peasant's whistling breath, that lightens His duteous toil of furrowing the green earth. For the tired slave song lifts the languid oar,

And bids it aptly fall, with chime

That beautifies the fairest shore,

And mitigates the harshest clime."

The state of constant vigilance in which the blind man is required to keep his perceptive faculties, begets habits of the acutest and widest observation. His acquaintance with the facts occurring immediately in his own neighborhood, will probably be more thorough and complete than that of his seeing companions. Moreover, it is needful that that which he discerns and learns should be well retained -incapable of reference, he must needs have, and the need begets, an ample and retentive memory. Others acquire the treasures of knowledge with ease, and scatter them with prodigality. He acquires with toil, and thriftily hoards his possessions. It is not because nature has endowed him with a better memory than other men, but because necessity is urging him to acquire it, that he possesses, in such high condition, this much-coveted perfection of development. Forgetfulness is the offspring