lories of the
Seventh Heaven are open to thy gaze, and thy glare is felt in the woes of
the lowest Erebus. The sealed books of heaven by thee are read, and thine
eyes like the Infinite can pierce the dark veil of the future, and glance
backward through the mystic cycle of the past.

Thy touch gives the lily its whiteness, the rose its tint, and thy
kindling ray makes the diamond's light. Thy beams are mighty as the power
that binds the spheres. Thou canst change the sleety winds to soothing
zephyrs, and thou canst melt the icy mountains of the poles to gentle
rains and dewy vapors. The granite rocks of the hills are upturned by
thee, volcanoes burst, islands sink and rise, rivers roll and oceans swell
at thy look of command. And oh! thou monarch of the skies, bend now thy
bow of millioned arrows, and pierce, if thou canst, this darkness that
thrice twelve moons has bound me.

Burst now thy emerald gates, O Morn, and let thy dawnings come! Mine eyes
roll in vain to find thee, and my soul is weary of this interminable
gloom. The past comes back robed in a pall which makes all things dark.
The present blotted out, and the future but a rayless, hopeless, loveless
night of years, my heart is but the tomb of blighted hopes, and all the
misery of feelings unemployed has settled on me. I am misfortune's child
and sorrow long since marked me for her own.

IS IT MORE TO LOSE THE EYES THAN THE EARS?

(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?