pulchre of bricks to be built,
and there within buried the statue, and covered it
with a broad slab of stone, that it might not in
any way be injured. It has very many sweet
beauties which the eyes alone can comprehend not,
either by strong or tempered light; only the hand
by touching them finds them out."

Hold out your hands to feel the luxury of the sunbeams. Press the soft
blossoms against your cheek, and finger their graces of form, their
delicate mutability of shape, their pliancy and freshness. Expose your
face to the aerial floods that sweep the heavens, "inhale great draughts
of space," wonder, wonder at the wind's unwearied activity. Pile note
on note the infinite music that flows increasingly to your soul from the
tactual sonorities of a thousand branches and tumbling waters. How can
the world be shrivelled when this most profound, emotional sense, touch,
is faithful to its service? I am sure that if a fairy bade me choose
between the sense of light and that of touch, I would not part with the
warm, endearing contact of human hands or the wealth of form, the
nobility and fullness that press into my palms.

FOOTNOTE:

[C] I found that of the senses, the eye is the most superficial, the ear
the most arrogant, smell the most voluptuous, taste the most
superstitious and fickle, touch the most profound and the most
philosophical.

THE FIVE-SENSED WORLD

VIII

THE FIVE-SENSED WORLD

THE poets have taught us how full of wonders is the night; and the night
of blindness has its wonders, too. The only lightless dark is the night
of ignorance and insensibility. We differ, blind and seeing, one from
another, not in our senses, but in the use we make of them, in the
imagination and courage with which we seek wisdom beyond our senses.

It is more difficult to teach ignorance to think than to teach an
intelligent blind man to see the grandeur of Niagara. I have walked with
people whose eyes are full of light, but who see nothing in wood, sea,
or sky, nothing in city streets, nothing in books. What a witless
masquerade is this seeing! It were better far to sail forever in the
night of blindness, with sense and feeling and mind, than to be thus
content with the mere act of seeing. They have the sunset, the morning
skies, the purple of distant hills, yet their souls voyage through this
enchanted world with a barren stare.

The calamity of th