happens, he has music in his soul, he has a realm of gold for his
inheritance that makes life a perpetual holiday. Have you heard Mr. William
Wolstenholme, the composer, improvising on the piano? If not, you have no
idea what a jolly world the world of sounds can be to the blind. Of course,
the case of the musician is hardly a fair test. With him, hearing is life
and deafness death. There is no more pathetic story than that of Beethoven
breaking the strings of the piano in his vain efforts to make his immortal
harmonies penetrate his soundless ears. Can we doubt that had he been
afflicted with blindness instead of deafness the tragedy of his life would
have been immeasurably relieved? What peace, could he have heard his Ninth
Symphony, would have slid into his soul. Blind Milton, sitting at his
organ, was a less tragic figure and probably a happier man than Milton with
a useless ear-trumpet would have been. Perhaps without the stimulus of the
organ he could not have fashioned that song which, as Macaulay says in his
grandiloquent way, "would not have misbecome the lips of those ethereal
beings whom he saw with that inner eye, which no calamity could darken,
flinging down on the jasper pavements their crowns of amaranth and gold."

It is probable that in a material sense blindness is the most terrible
affliction that can befall us; but I am here speaking only of its spiritual
effects, and in this respect the deprivation of hearing and speech seems to
involve a more forlorn state than the deprivation of sight. The one
affliction means spiritual loneliness: the other deepens the spiritual
intimacies of life. It was a man who had gone blind late in life who said:
"I am thankful it is my sight which has gone rather than my hearing. The
one has shut me off from the sun: the other would have shut me off from
life."