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+The Project Gutenberg eBook of The World I Live In, by Helen Keller
+
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+
+
+
+Title: The World I Live In
+
+
+Author: Helen Keller
+
+
+
+Release Date: January 1, 2009  [eBook #27683]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-646-US (US-ASCII)
+
+
+***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE WORLD I LIVE IN***
+
+
+E-text prepared by David Clarke, Emmy, and the Project Gutenberg Online
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+
+
+
+
+
+THE WORLD I LIVE IN
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+HELEN KELLER
+
+
+   "The autobiography of Helen Keller is
+   unquestionably one of the most remarkable records
+   ever published."--_British Weekly._
+
+   "This book is a human document of intense
+   interest, and without a parallel, we suppose, in
+   the history of literature."--_Yorkshire Post._
+
+   "Miss Keller's autobiography, well written and
+   full of practical interest in all sides of life,
+   literary, artistic and social, records an
+   extraordinary victory over physical
+   disabilities."--_Times._
+
+   "This book is a record of the miraculous. No one
+   can read it without being profoundly touched by
+   the patience and devotion which brought the blind,
+   deaf-mute child into touch with human life,
+   without being filled with wonder at the quick
+   intelligence which made such communication with
+   the outside world possible."--_Queen._
+
+   _Illustrated, price 7s. 6d._
+
+   POPULAR EDITION, _net, 1s._
+
+
+   The Story of My Life
+
+   By HELEN KELLER
+
+        *       *       *       *       *
+
+   The Practice of Optimism
+
+   _Cloth, net, 1s. 6d.; paper, net, 1s._
+
+        *       *       *       *       *
+
+   LONDON: HODDER & STOUGHTON, E.C.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+[Illustration: Copyright, 1907, by The Whitman Studio
+
+Helen Keller in Her Study]
+
+THE WORLD I LIVE IN
+
+by
+
+HELEN KELLER
+
+Author of "The Story of My Life," Etc.
+
+Illustrated
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+Hodder and Stoughton
+London New York Toronto
+
+Copyright 1904, 1908, by The Century Co.
+
+
+
+
+                TO
+
+           HENRY H. ROGERS
+
+          MY DEAR FRIEND OF
+
+             MANY YEARS
+
+
+
+
+PREFACE
+
+
+The essays and the poem in this book appeared originally in the "Century
+Magazine," the essays under the titles "A Chat About the Hand," "Sense
+and Sensibility," and "My Dreams." Mr. Gilder suggested the articles,
+and I thank him for his kind interest and encouragement. But he must
+also accept the responsibility which goes with my gratitude. For it is
+owing to his wish and that of other editors that I talk so much about
+myself.
+
+Every book is in a sense autobiographical. But while other
+self-recording creatures are permitted at least to seem to change the
+subject, apparently nobody cares what I think of the tariff, the
+conservation of our natural resources, or the conflicts which revolve
+about the name of Dreyfus. If I offer to reform the education system of
+the world, my editorial friends say, "That is interesting. But will you
+please tell us what idea you had of goodness and beauty when you were
+six years old?" First they ask me to tell the life of the child who is
+mother to the woman. Then they make me my own daughter and ask for an
+account of grown-up sensations. Finally I am requested to write about my
+dreams, and thus I become an anachronical grandmother; for it is the
+special privilege of old age to relate dreams. The editors are so kind
+that they are no doubt right in thinking that nothing I have to say
+about the affairs of the universe would be interesting. But until they
+give me opportunity to write about matters that are not-me, the world
+must go on uninstructed and unreformed, and I can only do my best with
+the one small subject upon which I am allowed to discourse.
+
+In "The Chant of Darkness" I did not intend to set up as a poet. I
+thought I was writing prose, except for the magnificent passage from Job
+which I was paraphrasing. But this part seemed to my friends to separate
+itself from the exposition, and I made it into a kind of poem.
+
+                                                               H. K.
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+
+          CHAPTER I
+                                            PAGE
+          THE SEEING HAND                      3
+
+          CHAPTER II
+          THE HANDS OF OTHERS                 19
+
+          CHAPTER III
+          THE HAND OF THE RACE                33
+
+          CHAPTER IV
+          THE POWER OF TOUCH                  45
+
+          CHAPTER V
+          THE FINER VIBRATIONS                63
+
+          CHAPTER VI
+          SMELL, THE FALLEN ANGEL             77
+
+          CHAPTER VII
+          RELATIVE VALUES OF THE SENSES       95
+
+          CHAPTER VIII
+          THE FIVE-SENSED WORLD              103
+
+          CHAPTER IX
+          INWARD VISIONS                     115
+
+          CHAPTER X
+          ANALOGIES IN SENSE PERCEPTION      129
+
+          CHAPTER X
+          BEFORE THE SOUL DAWN               141
+
+          CHAPTER XII
+          THE LARGER SANCTIONS               153
+
+          CHAPTER XIII
+          THE DREAM WORLD                    169
+
+          CHAPTER XIV
+          DREAMS AND REALITY                 195
+
+          CHAPTER XV
+          A WAKING DREAM                     209
+
+          A CHANT OF DARKNESS                229
+
+
+
+
+ILLUSTRATIONS
+
+
+          HELEN KELLER IN HER STUDY              _Frontispiece_
+
+          THE MEDALLION                       _Facing page_ 22
+
+          "LISTENING" TO THE TREES                "    "    70
+
+          THE LITTLE BOY NEXT DOOR                "    "   120
+
+
+
+
+THE SEEING HAND
+
+
+
+
+I
+
+THE SEEING HAND
+
+
+I HAVE just touched my dog. He was rolling on the grass, with pleasure
+in every muscle and limb. I wanted to catch a picture of him in my
+fingers, and I touched him as lightly as I would cobwebs; but lo, his
+fat body revolved, stiffened and solidified into an upright position,
+and his tongue gave my hand a lick! He pressed close to me, as if he
+were fain to crowd himself into my hand. He loved it with his tail, with
+his paw, with his tongue. If he could speak, I believe he would say with
+me that paradise is attained by touch; for in touch is all love and
+intelligence.
+
+This small incident started me on a chat about hands, and if my chat is
+fortunate I have to thank my dog-star. In any case, it is pleasant to
+have something to talk about that no one else has monopolized; it is
+like making a new path in the trackless woods, blazing the trail where
+no foot has pressed before. I am glad to take you by the hand and lead
+you along an untrodden way into a world where the hand is supreme. But
+at the very outset we encounter a difficulty. You are so accustomed to
+light, I fear you will stumble when I try to guide you through the land
+of darkness and silence. The blind are not supposed to be the best of
+guides. Still, though I cannot warrant not to lose you, I promise that
+you shall not be led into fire or water, or fall into a deep pit. If
+you will follow me patiently, you will find that "there's a sound so
+fine, nothing lives 'twixt it and silence," and that there is more meant
+in things than meets the eye.
+
+My hand is to me what your hearing and sight together are to you. In
+large measure we travel the same highways, read the same books, speak
+the same language, yet our experiences are different. All my comings and
+goings turn on the hand as on a pivot. It is the hand that binds me to
+the world of men and women. The hand is my feeler with which I reach
+through isolation and darkness and seize every pleasure, every activity
+that my fingers encounter. With the dropping of a little word from
+another's hand into mine, a slight flutter of the fingers, began the
+intelligence, the joy, the fullness of my life. Like Job, I feel as if
+a hand had made me, fashioned me together round about and moulded my
+very soul.
+
+In all my experiences and thoughts I am conscious of a hand. Whatever
+moves me, whatever thrills me, is as a hand that touches me in the dark,
+and that touch is my reality. You might as well say that a sight which
+makes you glad, or a blow which brings the stinging tears to your eyes,
+is unreal as to say that those impressions are unreal which I have
+accumulated by means of touch. The delicate tremble of a butterfly's
+wings in my hand, the soft petals of violets curling in the cool folds
+of their leaves or lifting sweetly out of the meadow-grass, the clear,
+firm outline of face and limb, the smooth arch of a horse's neck and
+the velvety touch of his nose--all these, and a thousand resultant
+combinations, which take shape in my mind, constitute my world.
+
+Ideas make the world we live in, and impressions furnish ideas. My world
+is built of touch-sensations, devoid of physical colour and sound; but
+without colour and sound it breathes and throbs with life. Every object
+is associated in my mind with tactual qualities which, combined in
+countless ways, give me a sense of power, of beauty, or of incongruity:
+for with my hands I can feel the comic as well as the beautiful in the
+outward appearance of things. Remember that you, dependent on your
+sight, do not realize how many things are tangible. All palpable things
+are mobile or rigid, solid or liquid, big or small, warm or cold, and
+these qualities are variously modified. The coolness of a water-lily
+rounding into bloom is different from the coolness of an evening wind in
+summer, and different again from the coolness of the rain that soaks
+into the hearts of growing things and gives them life and body. The
+velvet of the rose is not that of a ripe peach or of a baby's dimpled
+cheek. The hardness of the rock is to the hardness of wood what a man's
+deep bass is to a woman's voice when it is low. What I call beauty I
+find in certain combinations of all these qualities, and is largely
+derived from the flow of curved and straight lines which is over all
+things.
+
+"What does the straight line mean to you?" I think you will ask.
+
+It _means_ several things. It symbolizes duty. It seems to have the
+quality of inexorableness that duty has. When I have something to do
+that must not be set aside, I feel as if I were going forward in a
+straight line, bound to arrive somewhere, or go on forever without
+swerving to the right or to the left.
+
+That is what it means. To escape this moralizing you should ask, "How
+does the straight line feel?" It feels, as I suppose it looks,
+straight--a dull thought drawn out endlessly. Eloquence to the touch
+resides not in straight lines, but in unstraight lines, or in many
+curved and straight lines together. They appear and disappear, are now
+deep, now shallow, now broken off or lengthened or swelling. They rise
+and sink beneath my fingers, they are full of sudden starts and pauses,
+and their variety is inexhaustible and wonderful. So you see I am not
+shut out from the region of the beautiful, though my hand cannot
+perceive the brilliant colours in the sunset or on the mountain, or
+reach into the blue depths of the sky.
+
+Physics tells me that I am well off in a world which, I am told, knows
+neither cold nor sound, but is made in terms of size, shape, and
+inherent qualities; for at least every object appears to my fingers
+standing solidly right side up, and is not an inverted image on the
+retina which, I understand, your brain is at infinite though unconscious
+labour to set back on its feet. A tangible object passes complete into
+my brain with the warmth of life upon it, and occupies the same place
+that it does in space; for, without egotism, the mind is as large as the
+universe. When I think of hills, I think of the upward strength I tread
+upon. When water is the object of my thought, I feel the cool shock of
+the plunge and the quick yielding of the waves that crisp and curl and
+ripple about my body. The pleasing changes of rough and smooth, pliant
+and rigid, curved and straight in the bark and branches of a tree give
+the truth to my hand. The immovable rock, with its juts and warped
+surface, bends beneath my fingers into all manner of grooves and
+hollows. The bulge of a watermelon and the puffed-up rotundities of
+squashes that sprout, bud, and ripen in that strange garden planted
+somewhere behind my finger-tips are the ludicrous in my tactual memory
+and imagination. My fingers are tickled to delight by the soft ripple
+of a baby's laugh, and find amusement in the lusty crow of the barnyard
+autocrat. Once I had a pet rooster that used to perch on my knee and
+stretch his neck and crow. A bird in my hand was then worth two in
+the--barnyard.
+
+My fingers cannot, of course, get the impression of a large whole at a
+glance; but I feel the parts, and my mind puts them together. I move
+around my house, touching object after object in order, before I can
+form an idea of the entire house. In other people's houses I can touch
+only what is shown to me--the chief objects of interest, carvings on the
+wall, or a curious architectural feature, exhibited like the family
+album. Therefore a house with which I am not familiar has for me, at
+first, no general effect or harmony of detail. It is not a complete
+conception, but a collection of object-impressions which, as they come
+to me, are disconnected and isolated. But my mind is full of
+associations, sensations, theories, and with them it constructs the
+house. The process reminds me of the building of Solomon's temple, where
+was neither saw, nor hammer, nor any tool heard while the stones were
+being laid one upon another. The silent worker is imagination which
+decrees reality out of chaos.
+
+Without imagination what a poor thing my world would be! My garden would
+be a silent patch of earth strewn with sticks of a variety of shapes and
+smells. But when the eye of my mind is opened to its beauty, the bare
+ground brightens beneath my feet, and the hedge-row bursts into leaf,
+and the rose-tree shakes its fragrance everywhere. I know how budding
+trees look, and I enter into the amorous joy of the mating birds, and
+this is the miracle of imagination.
+
+Twofold is the miracle when, through my fingers, my imagination reaches
+forth and meets the imagination of an artist which he has embodied in a
+sculptured form. Although, compared with the life-warm, mobile face of a
+friend, the marble is cold and pulseless and unresponsive, yet it is
+beautiful to my hand. Its flowing curves and bendings are a real
+pleasure; only breath is wanting; but under the spell of the imagination
+the marble thrills and becomes the divine reality of the ideal.
+Imagination puts a sentiment into every line and curve, and the statue
+in my touch is indeed the goddess herself who breathes and moves and
+enchants.
+
+It is true, however, that some sculptures, even recognized masterpieces,
+do not please my hand. When I touch what there is of the Winged Victory,
+it reminds me at first of a headless, limbless dream that flies towards
+me in an unrestful sleep. The garments of the Victory thrust stiffly out
+behind, and do not resemble garments that I have felt flying,
+fluttering, folding, spreading in the wind. But imagination fulfils
+these imperfections, and straightway the Victory becomes a powerful and
+spirited figure with the sweep of sea-winds in her robes and the
+splendour of conquest in her wings.
+
+I find in a beautiful statue perfection of bodily form, the qualities of
+balance and completeness. The Minerva, hung with a web of poetical
+allusion, gives me a sense of exhilaration that is almost physical; and
+I like the luxuriant, wavy hair of Bacchus and Apollo, and the wreath of
+ivy, so suggestive of pagan holidays.
+
+So imagination crowns the experience of my hands. And they learned their
+cunning from the wise hand of another, which, itself guided by
+imagination, led me safely in paths that I knew not, made darkness light
+before me, and made crooked ways straight.
+
+
+
+
+THE HANDS OF OTHERS
+
+
+
+
+II
+
+THE HANDS OF OTHERS
+
+
+THE warmth and protectiveness of the hand are most homefelt to me who
+have always looked to it for aid and joy. I understand perfectly how the
+Psalmist can lift up his voice with strength and gladness, singing, "I
+put my trust in the Lord at all times, and his hand shall uphold me, and
+I shall dwell in safety." In the strength of the human hand, too, there
+is something divine. I am told that the glance of a beloved eye thrills
+one from a distance; but there is no distance in the touch of a beloved
+hand. Even the letters I receive are--
+
+          Kind letters that betray the heart's deep history,
+          In which we feel the presence of a hand.
+
+It is interesting to observe the differences in the hands of people.
+They show all kinds of vitality, energy, stillness, and cordiality. I
+never realized how living the hand is until I saw those chill plaster
+images in Mr. Hutton's collection of casts. The hand I know in life has
+the fullness of blood in its veins, and is elastic with spirit. How
+different dear Mr. Hutton's hand was from its dull, insensate image! To
+me the cast lacks the very form of the hand. Of the many casts in Mr.
+Hutton's collection I did not recognize any, not even my own. But a
+loving hand I never forget. I remember in my fingers the large hands of
+Bishop Brooks, brimful of tenderness and a strong man's joy. If you were
+deaf and blind, and could have held Mr. Jefferson's hand, you would have
+seen in it a face and heard a kind voice unlike any other you have
+known. Mark Twain's hand is full of whimsies and the drollest humours,
+and while you hold it the drollery changes to sympathy and championship.
+
+[Illustration: Copyright, 1907, by the Whitman Studio
+
+The Medallion
+
+The bas-relief on the wall is a portrait of the Queen Dowager of Spain,
+which Her Majesty had made for Miss Keller
+
+To face page 22]
+
+I am told that the words I have just written do not "describe" the hands
+of my friends, but merely endow them with the kindly human qualities
+which I know they possess, and which language conveys in abstract words.
+The criticism implies that I am not giving the primary truth of what I
+feel; but how otherwise do descriptions in books I read, written by men
+who can see, render the visible look of a face? I read that a face is
+strong, gentle; that it is full of patience, of intellect; that it is
+fine, sweet, noble, beautiful. Have I not the same right to use these
+words in describing what I feel as you have in describing what you see?
+They express truly what I feel in the hand. I am seldom conscious of
+physical qualities, and I do not remember whether the fingers of a hand
+are short or long, or the skin is moist or dry. No more can you, without
+conscious effort, recall the details of a face, even when you have seen
+it many times. If you do recall the features, and say that an eye is
+blue, a chin sharp, a nose short, or a cheek sunken, I fancy that you do
+not succeed well in giving the impression of the person,--not so well
+as when you interpret at once to the heart the essential moral qualities
+of the face--its humour, gravity, sadness, spirituality. If I should
+tell you in physical terms how a hand feels, you would be no wiser for
+my account than a blind man to whom you describe a face in detail.
+Remember that when a blind man recovers his sight, he does not recognize
+the commonest thing that has been familiar to his touch, the dearest
+face intimate to his fingers, and it does not help him at all that
+things and people have been described to him again and again. So you,
+who are untrained of touch, do not recognize a hand by the grasp; and
+so, too, any description I might give would fail to make you acquainted
+with a friendly hand which my fingers have often folded about, and
+which my affection translates to my memory.
+
+I cannot describe hands under any class or type; there is no democracy
+of hands. Some hands tell me that they do everything with the maximum of
+bustle and noise. Other hands are fidgety and unadvised, with nervous,
+fussy fingers which indicate a nature sensitive to the little pricks of
+daily life. Sometimes I recognize with foreboding the kindly but stupid
+hand of one who tells with many words news that is no news. I have met a
+bishop with a jocose hand, a humourist with a hand of leaden gravity, a
+man of pretentious valour with a timorous hand, and a quiet, apologetic
+man with a fist of iron. When I was a little girl I was taken to see[A]
+a woman who was blind and paralysed. I shall never forget how she held
+out her small, trembling hand and pressed sympathy into mine. My eyes
+fill with tears as I think of her. The weariness, pain, darkness, and
+sweet patience were all to be felt in her thin, wasted, groping, loving
+hand.
+
+Few people who do not know me will understand, I think, how much I get
+of the mood of a friend who is engaged in oral conversation with
+somebody else. My hand follows his motions; I touch his hand, his arm,
+his face. I can tell when he is full of glee over a good joke which has
+not been repeated to me, or when he is telling a lively story. One of
+my friends is rather aggressive, and his hand always announces the
+coming of a dispute. By his impatient jerk I know he has argument ready
+for some one. I have felt him start as a sudden recollection or a new
+idea shot through his mind. I have felt grief in his hand. I have felt
+his soul wrap itself in darkness majestically as in a garment. Another
+friend has positive, emphatic hands which show great pertinacity of
+opinion. She is the only person I know who emphasizes her spelled words
+and accents them as she emphasizes and accents her spoken words when I
+read her lips. I like this varied emphasis better than the monotonous
+pound of unmodulated people who hammer their meaning into my palm.
+
+Some hands, when they clasp yours, beam and bubble over with gladness.
+They throb and expand with life. Strangers have clasped my hand like
+that of a long-lost sister. Other people shake hands with me as if with
+the fear that I may do them mischief. Such persons hold out civil
+finger-tips which they permit you to touch, and in the moment of
+contract they retreat, and inwardly you hope that you will not be called
+upon again to take that hand of "dormouse valour." It betokens a prudish
+mind, ungracious pride, and not seldom mistrust. It is the antipode to
+the hand of those who have large, lovable natures.
+
+The handshake of some people makes you think of accident and sudden
+death. Contrast this ill-boding hand with the quick, skilful, quiet hand
+of a nurse whom I remember with affection because she took the best
+care of my teacher. I have clasped the hands of some rich people that
+spin not and toil not, and yet are not beautiful. Beneath their soft,
+smooth roundness what a chaos of undeveloped character!
+
+I am sure there is no hand comparable to the physician's in patient
+skill, merciful gentleness and splendid certainty. No wonder that Ruskin
+finds in the sure strokes of the surgeon the perfection of control and
+delicate precision for the artist to emulate. If the physician is a man
+of great nature, there will be healing for the spirit in his touch. This
+magic touch of well-being was in the hand of a dear friend of mine who
+was our doctor in sickness and health. His happy cordial spirit did his
+patients good whether they needed medicine or not.
+
+As there are many beauties of the face, so the beauties of the hand are
+many. Touch has its ecstasies. The hands of people of strong
+individuality and sensitiveness are wonderfully mobile. In a glance of
+their finger-tips they express many shades of thought. Now and again I
+touch a fine, graceful, supple-wristed hand which spells with the same
+beauty and distinction that you must see in the handwriting of some
+highly cultivated people. I wish you could see how prettily little
+children spell in my hand. They are wild flowers of humanity, and their
+finger motions wild flowers of speech.
+
+All this is my private science of palmistry, and when I tell your
+fortune it is by no mysterious intuition or gipsy witchcraft, but by
+natural, explicable recognition of the embossed character in your hand.
+Not only is the hand as easy to recognize as the face, but it reveals
+its secrets more openly and unconsciously. People control their
+countenances, but the hand is under no such restraint. It relaxes and
+becomes listless when the spirit is low and dejected; the muscles
+tighten when the mind is excited or the heart glad; and permanent
+qualities stand written on it all the time.
+
+FOOTNOTE:
+
+[A] The excellent proof-reader has put a query to my use of the word
+"see." If I had said "visit," he would have asked no questions, yet what
+does "visit" mean but "see" (_visitare_)? Later I will try to defend
+myself for using as much of the English language as I have succeeded in
+learning.
+
+
+
+
+THE HAND OF THE RACE
+
+
+
+
+III
+
+THE HAND OF THE RACE
+
+
+LOOK in your "Century Dictionary," or if you are blind, ask your teacher
+to do it for you, and learn how many idioms are made on the idea of
+hand, and how many words are formed from the Latin root _manus_--enough
+words to name all the essential affairs of life. "Hand," with quotations
+and compounds, occupies twenty-four columns, eight pages of this
+dictionary. The hand is defined as "the organ of apprehension." How
+perfectly the definition fits my case in both senses of the word
+"apprehend"! With my hand I seize and hold all that I find in the three
+worlds--physical, intellectual, and spiritual.
+
+Think how man has regarded the world in terms of the hand. All life is
+divided between what lies _on one hand_ and on the other. The products
+of skill are _manu_factures. The conduct of affairs is _man_agement.
+History seems to be the record--alas for our chronicles of war!--of the
+_man_oeuvres of armies. But the history of peace, too, the narrative of
+labour in the field, the forest, and the vineyard, is written in the
+victorious sign _manual_--the sign of the hand that has conquered the
+wilderness. The labourer himself is called a _hand_. In _man_acle and
+_manu_mission we read the story of human slavery and freedom.
+
+The minor idioms are myriad; but I will not recall too many, lest you
+cry, "Hands off!" I cannot desist, however, from this word-game until I
+have set down a few. Whatever is not one's own by first possession is
+_second-hand_. That is what I am told my knowledge is. But my
+well-meaning friends come to my defence, and, not content with endowing
+me with natural _first-hand_ knowledge which is rightfully mine, ascribe
+to me a preternatural sixth sense and credit to miracles and heaven-sent
+compensations all that I have won and discovered with my good right
+hand. And with my left hand too; for with that I read, and it is as true
+and honourable as the other. By what half-development of human power has
+the left hand been neglected? When we arrive at the acme of civilization
+shall we not all be ambidextrous, and in our _hand-to-hand_ contests
+against difficulties shall we not be doubly triumphant? It occurs to me,
+by the way, that when my teacher was training my unreclaimed spirit, her
+struggle against the powers of darkness, with the stout arm of
+discipline and the light of the manual alphabet, was in two senses a
+hand-to-hand conflict.
+
+No essay would be complete without quotations from Shakspere. In the
+field which, in the presumption of my youth, I thought was my own he has
+reaped before me. In almost every play there are passages where the hand
+plays a part. Lady Macbeth's heart-broken soliloquy over her little
+hand, from which all the perfumes of Arabia will not wash the stain, is
+the most pitiful moment in the tragedy. Mark Antony rewards Scarus, the
+bravest of his soldiers, by asking Cleopatra to give him her hand:
+"Commend unto his lips thy favouring hand." In a different mood he is
+enraged because Thyreus, whom he despises, has presumed to kiss the hand
+of the queen, "my playfellow, the kingly seal of high hearts." When
+Cleopatra is threatened with the humiliation of gracing Caesar's triumph,
+she snatches a dagger, exclaiming, "I will trust my resolution and my
+good hands." With the same swift instinct, Cassius trusts to his hands
+when he stabs Caesar: "Speak, hands, for me!" "Let me kiss your hand,"
+says the blind Gloster to Lear. "Let me wipe it first," replies the
+broken old king; "it smells of mortality." How charged is this single
+touch with sad meaning! How it opens our eyes to the fearful purging
+Lear has undergone, to learn that royalty is no defence against
+ingratitude and cruelty! Gloster's exclamation about his son, "Did I but
+live to see thee in my touch, I'd say I had eyes again," is as true to a
+pulse within me as the grief he feels. The ghost in "Hamlet" recites the
+wrongs from which springs the tragedy:
+
+          Thus was I, sleeping, by a brother's hand.
+          At once of life, of crown, of queen dispatch'd.
+
+How that passage in "Othello" stops your breath--that passage full of
+bitter double intention in which Othello's suspicion tips with evil what
+he says about Desdemona's hand; and she in innocence answers only the
+innocent meaning of his words: "For 'twas that hand that gave away my
+heart."
+
+Not all Shakspere's great passages about the hand are tragic. Remember
+the light play of words in "Romeo and Juliet" where the dialogue, flying
+nimbly back and forth, weaves a pretty sonnet about the hand. And who
+knows the hand, if not the lover?
+
+The touch of the hand is in every chapter of the Bible. Why, you could
+almost rewrite Exodus as the story of the hand. Everything is done by
+the hand of the Lord and of Moses. The oppression of the Hebrews is
+translated thus: "The hand of Pharaoh was heavy upon the Hebrews." Their
+departure out of the land is told in these vivid words: "The Lord
+brought the children of Israel out of the house of bondage with a strong
+hand and a stretched-out arm." At the stretching out of the hand of
+Moses the waters of the Red Sea part and stand all on a heap. When the
+Lord lifts his hand in anger, thousands perish in the wilderness. Every
+act, every decree in the history of Israel, as indeed in the history of
+the human race, is sanctioned by the hand. Is it not used in the great
+moments of swearing, blessing, cursing, smiting, agreeing, marrying,
+building, destroying? Its sacredness is in the law that no sacrifice is
+valid unless the sacrificer lay his hand upon the head of the victim.
+The congregation lay their hands on the heads of those who are sentenced
+to death. How terrible the dumb condemnation of their hands must be to
+the condemned! When Moses builds the altar on Mount Sinai, he is
+commanded to use no tool, but rear it with his own hands. Earth, sea,
+sky, man, and all lower animals are holy unto the Lord because he has
+formed them with his hand. When the Psalmist considers the heavens and
+the earth, he exclaims: "What is man, O Lord, that thou art mindful of
+him? For thou hast made him to have dominion over the works of thy
+hands." The supplicating gesture of the hand always accompanies the
+spoken prayer, and with clean hands goes the pure heart.
+
+Christ comforted and blessed and healed and wrought many miracles with
+his hands. He touched the eyes of the blind, and they were opened. When
+Jairus sought him, overwhelmed with grief, Jesus went and laid his hands
+on the ruler's daughter, and she awoke from the sleep of death to her
+father's love. You also remember how he healed the crooked woman. He
+said to her, "Woman, thou art loosed from thine infirmity," and he laid
+his hands on her, and immediately she was made straight, and she
+glorified God.
+
+Look where we will, we find the hand in time and history, working,
+building, inventing, bringing civilization out of barbarism. The hand
+symbolizes power and the excellence of work. The mechanic's hand, that
+minister of elemental forces, the hand that hews, saws, cuts, builds, is
+useful in the world equally with the delicate hand that paints a wild
+flower or moulds a Grecian urn, or the hand of a statesman that writes a
+law. The eye cannot say to the hand, "I have no need of thee." Blessed
+be the hand! Thrice blessed be the hands that work!
+
+
+
+
+THE POWER OF TOUCH
+
+
+
+
+IV
+
+THE POWER OF TOUCH
+
+
+SOME months ago, in a newspaper which announced the publication of the
+"Matilda Ziegler Magazine for the Blind," appeared the following
+paragraph:
+
+"Many poems and stories must be omitted because they deal with sight.
+Allusion to moonbeams, rainbows, starlight, clouds, and beautiful
+scenery may not be printed, because they serve to emphasize the blind
+man's sense of his affliction."
+
+That is to say, I may not talk about beautiful mansions and gardens
+because I am poor. I may not read about Paris and the West Indies
+because I cannot visit them in their territorial reality. I may not
+dream of heaven because it is possible that I may never go there. Yet a
+venturesome spirit impels me to use words of sight and sound whose
+meaning I can guess only from analogy and fancy. This hazardous game is
+half the delight, the frolic, of daily life. I glow as I read of
+splendours which the eye alone can survey. Allusions to moonbeams and
+clouds do not emphasize the sense of my affliction: they carry my soul
+beyond affliction's narrow actuality.
+
+Critics delight to tell us what we cannot do. They assume that blindness
+and deafness sever us completely from the things which the seeing and
+the hearing enjoy, and hence they assert we have no moral right to talk
+about beauty, the skies, mountains, the song of birds, and colours. They
+declare that the very sensations we have from the sense of touch are
+"vicarious," as though our friends felt the sun for us! They deny _a
+priori_ what they have not seen and I have felt. Some brave doubters
+have gone so far even as to deny my existence. In order, therefore, that
+I may know that I exist, I resort to Descartes's method: "I think,
+therefore I am." Thus I am metaphysically established, and I throw upon
+the doubters the burden of proving my non-existence. When we consider
+how little has been found out about the mind, is it not amazing that any
+one should presume to define what one can know or cannot know? I admit
+that there are innumerable marvels in the visible universe unguessed by
+me. Likewise, O confident critic, there are a myriad sensations
+perceived by me of which you do not dream.
+
+Necessity gives to the eye a precious power of seeing, and in the same
+way it gives a precious power of feeling to the whole body. Sometimes it
+seems as if the very substance of my flesh were so many eyes looking out
+at will upon a world new created every day. The silence and darkness
+which are said to shut me in, open my door most hospitably to countless
+sensations that distract, inform, admonish, and amuse. With my three
+trusty guides, touch, smell, and taste, I make many excursions into the
+borderland of experience which is in sight of the city of Light. Nature
+accommodates itself to every man's necessity. If the eye is maimed, so
+that it does not see the beauteous face of day, the touch becomes more
+poignant and discriminating. Nature proceeds through practice to
+strengthen and augment the remaining senses. For this reason the blind
+often hear with greater ease and distinctness than other people. The
+sense of smell becomes almost a new faculty to penetrate the tangle and
+vagueness of things. Thus, according to an immutable law, the senses
+assist and reinforce one another.
+
+It is not for me to say whether we see best with the hand or the eye. I
+only know that the world I see with my fingers is alive, ruddy, and
+satisfying. Touch brings the blind many sweet certainties which our more
+fortunate fellows miss, because their sense of touch is uncultivated.
+When they look at things, they put their hands in their pockets. No
+doubt that is one reason why their knowledge is often so vague,
+inaccurate, and useless. It is probable, too, that our knowledge of
+phenomena beyond the reach of the hand is equally imperfect. But, at all
+events, we behold them through a golden mist of fantasy.
+
+There is nothing, however, misty or uncertain about what we can touch.
+Through the sense of touch I know the faces of friends, the illimitable
+variety of straight and curved lines, all surfaces, the exuberance of
+the soil, the delicate shapes of flowers, the noble forms of trees, and
+the range of mighty winds. Besides objects, surfaces, and atmospherical
+changes, I perceive countless vibrations. I derive much knowledge of
+everyday matter from the jars and jolts which are to be felt everywhere
+in the house.
+
+Footsteps, I discover, vary tactually according to the age, the sex, and
+the manners of the walker. It is impossible to mistake a child's patter
+for the tread of a grown person. The step of the young man, strong and
+free, differs from the heavy, sedate tread of the middle-aged, and from
+the step of the old man, whose feet drag along the floor, or beat it
+with slow, faltering accents. On a bare floor a girl walks with a rapid,
+elastic rhythm which is quite distinct from the graver step of the
+elderly woman. I have laughed over the creak of new shoes and the
+clatter of a stout maid performing a jig in the kitchen. One day, in the
+dining-room of an hotel, a tactual dissonance arrested my attention. I
+sat still and listened with my feet. I found that two waiters were
+walking back and forth, but not with the same gait. A band was playing,
+and I could feel the music-waves along the floor. One of the waiters
+walked in time to the band, graceful and light, while the other
+disregarded the music and rushed from table to table to the beat of some
+discord in his own mind. Their steps reminded me of a spirited war-steed
+harnessed with a cart-horse.
+
+Often footsteps reveal in some measure the character and the mood of the
+walker. I feel in them firmness and indecision, hurry and deliberation,
+activity and laziness, fatigue, carelessness, timidity, anger, and
+sorrow. I am most conscious of these moods and traits in persons with
+whom I am familiar.
+
+Footsteps are frequently interrupted by certain jars and jerks, so that
+I know when one kneels, kicks, shakes something, sits down, or gets up.
+Thus I follow to some extent the actions of people about me and the
+changes of their postures. Just now a thick, soft patter of bare, padded
+feet and a slight jolt told me that my dog had jumped on the chair to
+look out of the window. I do not, however, allow him to go
+uninvestigated; for occasionally I feel the same motion, and find him,
+not on the chair, but trespassing on the sofa.
+
+When a carpenter works in the house or in the barn near by, I know by
+the slanting, up-and-down, toothed vibration, and the ringing concussion
+of blow upon blow, that he is sawing or hammering. If I am near enough,
+a certain vibration, travelling back and forth along a wooden surface,
+brings me the information that he is using a plane.
+
+A slight flutter on the rug tells me that a breeze has blown my papers
+off the table. A round thump is a signal that a pencil has rolled on the
+floor. If a book falls, it gives a flat thud. A wooden rap on the
+balustrade announces that dinner is ready. Many of these vibrations are
+obliterated out of doors. On a lawn or the road, I can feel only
+running, stamping, and the rumble of wheels.
+
+By placing my hand on a person's lips and throat, I gain an idea of many
+specific vibrations, and interpret them: a boy's chuckle, a man's
+"Whew!" of surprise, the "Hem!" of annoyance or perplexity, the moan of
+pain, a scream, a whisper, a rasp, a sob, a choke, and a gasp. The
+utterances of animals, though wordless, are eloquent to me--the cat's
+purr, its mew, its angry, jerky, scolding spit; the dog's bow-wow of
+warning or of joyous welcome, its yelp of despair, and its contented
+snore; the cow's moo; a monkey's chatter; the snort of a horse; the
+lion's roar, and the terrible snarl of the tiger. Perhaps I ought to
+add, for the benefit of the critics and doubters who may peruse this
+essay, that with my own hands I have felt all these sounds. From my
+childhood to the present day I have availed myself of every opportunity
+to visit zoological gardens, menageries, and the circus, and all the
+animals, except the tiger, have talked into my hand. I have touched the
+tiger only in a museum, where he is as harmless as a lamb. I have,
+however, heard him talk by putting my hand on the bars of his cage. I
+have touched several lions in the flesh, and felt them roar royally,
+like a cataract over rocks.
+
+To continue, I know the _plop_ of liquid in a pitcher. So if I spill my
+milk, I have not the excuse of ignorance. I am also familiar with the
+pop of a cork, the sputter of a flame, the tick-tack of the clock, the
+metallic swing of the windmill, the laboured rise and fall of the pump,
+the voluminous spurt of the hose, the deceptive tap of the breeze at
+door and window, and many other vibrations past computing.
+
+There are tactual vibrations which do not belong to skin-touch. They
+penetrate the skin, the nerves, the bones, like pain, heat, and cold.
+The beat of a drum smites me through from the chest to the
+shoulder-blades. The din of the train, the bridge, and grinding
+machinery retains its "old-man-of-the-sea" grip upon me long after its
+cause has been left behind. If vibration and motion combine in my touch
+for any length of time, the earth seems to run away while I stand still.
+When I step off the train, the platform whirls round, and I find it
+difficult to walk steadily.
+
+Every atom of my body is a vibroscope. But my sensations are not
+infallible. I reach out, and my fingers meet something furry, which
+jumps about, gathers itself together as if to spring, and acts like an
+animal. I pause a moment for caution. I touch it again more firmly, and
+find it is a fur coat fluttering and flapping in the wind. To me, as to
+you, the earth seems motionless, and the sun appears to move; for the
+rays of the afternoon withdraw more and more, as they touch my face,
+until the air becomes cool. From this I understand how it is that the
+shore seems to recede as you sail away from it. Hence I feel no
+incredulity when you say that parallel lines appear to converge, and the
+earth and sky to meet. My few senses long ago revealed to me their
+imperfections and deceptivity.
+
+Not only are the senses deceptive, but numerous usages in our language
+indicate that people who have five senses find it difficult to keep
+their functions distinct. I understand that we hear views, see tones,
+taste music. I am told that voices have colour. Tact, which I have
+supposed to be a matter of nice perception, turns out to be a matter of
+taste. Judging from the large use of the word, taste appears to be the
+most important of all the senses. Taste governs the great and small
+conventions of life. Certainly the language of the senses is full of
+contradictions, and my fellows who have five doors to their house are
+not more surely at home in themselves than I. May I not, then, be
+excused if this account of my sensations lacks precision?
+
+
+
+
+THE FINER VIBRATIONS
+
+
+
+
+V
+
+THE FINER VIBRATIONS
+
+
+I HAVE spoken of the numerous jars and jolts which daily minister to my
+faculties. The loftier and grander vibrations which appeal to my
+emotions are varied and abundant. I listen with awe to the roll of the
+thunder and the muffled avalanche of sound when the sea flings itself
+upon the shore. And I love the instrument by which all the diapasons of
+the ocean are caught and released in surging floods--the many-voiced
+organ. If music could be seen, I could point where the organ-notes go,
+as they rise and fall, climb up and up, rock and sway, now loud and
+deep, now high and stormy, anon soft and solemn, with lighter
+vibrations interspersed between and running across them. I should say
+that organ-music fills to an ecstasy the act of feeling.
+
+There is tangible delight in other instruments, too. The violin seems
+beautifully alive as it responds to the lightest wish of the master. The
+distinction between its notes is more delicate than between the notes of
+the piano.
+
+I enjoy the music of the piano most when I touch the instrument. If I
+keep my hand on the piano-case, I detect tiny quavers, returns of
+melody, and the hush that follows. This explains to me how sound can die
+away to the listening ear:
+
+              . . . How thin and clear,
+            And thinner, clearer, farther going!
+          O sweet and far from cliff and scar
+            The horns of Elfland faintly blowing!
+
+I am able to follow the dominant spirit and mood of the music. I catch
+the joyous dance as it bounds over the keys, the slow dirge, the
+reverie. I thrill to the fiery sweep of notes crossed by thunderous
+tones in the "Walkuere," where _Wotan_ kindles the dread flames that
+guard the sleeping _Brunhild_. How wonderful is the instrument on which
+a great musician sings with his hands! I have never succeeded in
+distinguishing one composition from another. I think this is impossible;
+but the concentration and strain upon my attention would be so great
+that I doubt if the pleasure derived would be commensurate to the
+effort.
+
+Nor can I distinguish easily a tune that is sung. But by placing my hand
+on another's throat and cheek, I enjoy the changes of the voice. I know
+when it is low or high, clear or muffled, sad or cheery. The thin,
+quavering sensation of an old voice differs in my touch from the
+sensation of a young voice. A Southerner's drawl is quite unlike the
+Yankee twang. Sometimes the flow and ebb of a voice is so enchanting
+that my fingers quiver with exquisite pleasure, even if I do not
+understand a word that is spoken.
+
+On the other hand, I am exceedingly sensitive to the harshness of noises
+like grinding, scraping, and the hoarse creak of rusty locks.
+Fog-whistles are my vibratory nightmares. I have stood near a bridge in
+process of construction, and felt the tactual din, the rattle of heavy
+masses of stone, the roll of loosened earth, the rumble of engines, the
+dumping of dirt-cars, the triple blows of vulcan hammers. I can also
+smell the fire-pots, the tar and cement. So I have a vivid idea of
+mighty labours in steel and stone, and I believe that I am acquainted
+with all the fiendish noises which can be made by man or machinery. The
+whack of heavy falling bodies, the sudden shivering splinter of chopped
+logs, the crystal shatter of pounded ice, the crash of a tree hurled to
+the earth by a hurricane, the irrational, persistent chaos of noise made
+by switching freight-trains, the explosion of gas, the blasting of
+stone, and the terrific grinding of rock upon rock which precedes the
+collapse--all these have been in my touch-experience, and contribute to
+my idea of Bedlam, of a battle, a waterspout, an earthquake, and other
+enormous accumulations of sound.
+
+Touch brings me into contact with the traffic and manifold activity of
+the city. Besides the bustle and crowding of people and the nondescript
+grating and electric howling of street-cars, I am conscious of
+exhalations from many different kinds of shops; from automobiles, drays,
+horses, fruit stands, and many varieties of smoke.
+
+          Odours strange and musty,
+          The air sharp and dusty
+          With lime and with sand,
+          That no one can stand,
+          Make the street impassable,
+          The people irascible,
+          Until every one cries,
+          As he trembling goes
+          With the sight of his eyes
+          And the scent of his nose
+          Quite stopped--or at least much diminished--
+          "Gracious! when will this city be finished?"[B]
+
+
+[Illustration: Copyright, 1907, by The Whitman Studio
+
+"Listening" to the Trees
+
+To face page 70]
+
+The city is interesting; but the tactual silence of the country is
+always most welcome after the din of town and the irritating concussions
+of the train. How noiseless and undisturbing are the demolition, the
+repairs and the alterations, of nature! With no sound of hammer or saw
+or stone severed from stone, but a music of rustles and ripe thumps on
+the grass come the fluttering leaves and mellow fruits which the wind
+tumbles all day from the branches. Silently all droops, all withers, all
+is poured back into the earth that it may recreate; all sleeps while the
+busy architects of day and night ply their silent work elsewhere. The
+same serenity reigns when all at once the soil yields up a newly wrought
+creation. Softly the ocean of grass, moss, and flowers rolls surge upon
+surge across the earth. Curtains of foliage drape the bare branches.
+Great trees make ready in their sturdy hearts to receive again birds
+which occupy their spacious chambers to the south and west. Nay, there
+is no place so lowly that it may not lodge some happy creature. The
+meadow brook undoes its icy fetters with rippling notes, gurgles, and
+runs free. And all this is wrought in less than two months to the music
+of nature's orchestra, in the midst of balmy incense.
+
+The thousand soft voices of the earth have truly found their way to
+me--the small rustle in tufts of grass, the silky swish of leaves, the
+buzz of insects, the hum of bees in blossoms I have plucked, the flutter
+of a bird's wings after his bath, and the slender rippling vibration
+of water running over pebbles. Once having been felt, these loved voices
+rustle, buzz, hum, flutter, and ripple in my thought forever, an undying
+part of happy memories.
+
+Between my experiences and the experiences of others there is no gulf of
+mute space which I may not bridge. For I have endlessly varied,
+instructive contacts with all the world, with life, with the atmosphere
+whose radiant activity enfolds us all. The thrilling energy of the
+all-encasing air is warm and rapturous. Heat-waves and sound-waves play
+upon my face in infinite variety and combination, until I am able to
+surmise what must be the myriad sounds that my senseless ears have not
+heard.
+
+The air varies in different regions, at different seasons of the year,
+and even different hours of the day. The odorous, fresh sea-breezes are
+distinct from the fitful breezes along river banks, which are humid and
+freighted with inland smells. The bracing, light, dry air of the
+mountains can never be mistaken for the pungent salt air of the ocean.
+The air of winter is dense, hard, compressed. In the spring it has new
+vitality. It is light, mobile, and laden with a thousand palpitating
+odours from earth, grass, and sprouting leaves. The air of midsummer is
+dense, saturated, or dry and burning, as if it came from a furnace. When
+a cool breeze brushes the sultry stillness, it brings fewer odours than
+in May, and frequently the odour of a coming tempest. The avalanche of
+coolness which sweeps through the low-hanging air bears little
+resemblance to the stinging coolness of winter.
+
+The rain of winter is raw, without odour, and dismal. The rain of spring
+is brisk, fragrant, charged with life-giving warmth. I welcome it
+delightedly as it visits the earth, enriches the streams, waters the
+hills abundantly, makes the furrows soft with showers for the seed,
+elicits a perfume which I cannot breathe deep enough. Spring rain is
+beautiful, impartial, lovable. With pearly drops it washes every leaf on
+tree and bush, ministers equally to salutary herbs and noxious growths,
+searches out every living thing that needs its beneficence.
+
+The senses assist and reinforce each other to such an extent that I am
+not sure whether touch or smell tells me the most about the world.
+Everywhere the river of touch is joined by the brooks of
+odour-perception. Each season has its distinctive odours. The spring is
+earthy and full of sap. July is rich with the odour of ripening grain
+and hay. As the season advances, a crisp, dry, mature odour
+predominates, and golden-rod, tansy, and everlastings mark the onward
+march of the year. In autumn, soft, alluring scents fill the air,
+floating from thicket, grass, flower, and tree, and they tell me of time
+and change, of death and life's renewal, desire and its fulfilment.
+
+FOOTNOTE:
+
+[B] George Arnold.
+
+
+
+
+SMELL, THE FALLEN ANGEL
+
+
+
+
+VI
+
+SMELL, THE FALLEN ANGEL
+
+
+FOR some inexplicable reason the sense of smell does not hold the high
+position it deserves among its sisters. There is something of the fallen
+angel about it. When it woos us with woodland scents and beguiles us
+with the fragrance of lovely gardens, it is admitted frankly to our
+discourse. But when it gives us warning of something noxious in our
+vicinity, it is treated as if the demon had got the upper hand of the
+angel, and is relegated to outer darkness, punished for its faithful
+service. It is most difficult to keep the true significance of words
+when one discusses the prejudices of mankind, and I find it hard to give
+an account of odour-perceptions which shall be at once dignified and
+truthful.
+
+In my experience smell is most important, and I find that there is high
+authority for the nobility of the sense which we have neglected and
+disparaged. It is recorded that the Lord commanded that incense be burnt
+before him continually with a sweet savour. I doubt if there is any
+sensation arising from sight more delightful than the odours which
+filter through sun-warmed, wind-tossed branches, or the tide of scents
+which swells, subsides, rises again wave on wave, filling the wide world
+with invisible sweetness. A whiff of the universe makes us dream of
+worlds we have never seen, recalls in a flash entire epochs of our
+dearest experience. I never smell daisies without living over again the
+ecstatic mornings that my teacher and I spent wandering in the fields,
+while I learned new words and the names of things. Smell is a potent
+wizard that transports us across a thousand miles and all the years we
+have lived. The odour of fruits wafts me to my Southern home, to my
+childish frolics in the peach orchard. Other odours, instantaneous and
+fleeting, cause my heart to dilate joyously or contract with remembered
+grief. Even as I think of smells, my nose is full of scents that start
+awake sweet memories of summers gone and ripening grain fields far away.
+
+The faintest whiff from a meadow where the new-mown hay lies in the hot
+sun displaces the here and the now. I am back again in the old red barn.
+My little friends and I are playing in the haymow. A huge mow it is,
+packed with crisp, sweet hay, from the top of which the smallest child
+can reach the straining rafters. In their stalls beneath are the farm
+animals. Here is Jerry, unresponsive, unbeautiful Jerry, crunching his
+oats like a true pessimist, resolved to find his feed not good--at least
+not so good as it ought to be. Again I touch Brownie, eager, grateful
+little Brownie, ready to leave the juiciest fodder for a pat, straining
+his beautiful, slender neck for a caress. Near by stands Lady Belle,
+with sweet, moist mouth, lazily extracting the sealed-up cordial from
+timothy and clover, and dreaming of deep June pastures and murmurous
+streams.
+
+The sense of smell has told me of a coming storm hours before there was
+any sign of it visible. I notice first a throb of expectancy, a slight
+quiver, a concentration in my nostrils. As the storm draws nearer, my
+nostrils dilate the better to receive the flood of earth-odours which
+seem to multiply and extend, until I feel the splash of rain against my
+cheek. As the tempest departs, receding farther and farther, the odours
+fade, become fainter and fainter, and die away beyond the bar of space.
+
+I know by smell the kind of house we enter. I have recognized an
+old-fashioned country house because it has several layers of odours,
+left by a succession of families, of plants, perfumes, and draperies.
+
+In the evening quiet there are fewer vibrations than in the daytime, and
+then I rely more largely upon smell. The sulphuric scent of a match
+tells me that the lamps are being lighted. Later I note the wavering
+trail of odour that flits about and disappears. It is the curfew signal;
+the lights are out for the night.
+
+Out of doors I am aware by smell and touch of the ground we tread and
+the places we pass. Sometimes, when there is no wind, the odours are so
+grouped that I know the character of the country, and can place a
+hayfield, a country store, a garden, a barn, a grove of pines, a
+farmhouse with the windows open.
+
+The other day I went to walk toward a familiar wood. Suddenly a
+disturbing odour made me pause in dismay. Then followed a peculiar,
+measured jar, followed by dull, heavy thunder. I understood the odour
+and the jar only too well. The trees were being cut down. We climbed the
+stone wall to the left. It borders the wood which I have loved so long
+that it seems to be my peculiar possession. But to-day an unfamiliar
+rush of air and an unwonted outburst of sun told me that my tree friends
+were gone. The place was empty, like a deserted dwelling. I stretched
+out my hand. Where once stood the steadfast pines, great, beautiful,
+sweet, my hand touched raw, moist stumps. All about lay broken branches,
+like the antlers of stricken deer. The fragrant, piled-up sawdust
+swirled and tumbled about me. An unreasoning resentment flashed through
+me at this ruthless destruction of the beauty that I love. But there is
+no anger, no resentment in nature. The air is equally charged with the
+odours of life and of destruction, for death equally with growth forever
+ministers to all-conquering life. The sun shines as ever, and the winds
+riot through the newly opened spaces. I know that a new forest will
+spring where the old one stood, as beautiful, as beneficent.
+
+Touch sensations are permanent and definite. Odours deviate and are
+fugitive, changing in their shades, degrees, and location. There is
+something else in odour which gives me a sense of distance. I should
+call it horizon--the line where odour and fancy meet at the farthest
+limit of scent.
+
+Smell gives me more idea than touch or taste of the manner in which
+sight and hearing probably discharge their functions. Touch seems to
+reside in the object touched, because there is a contact of surfaces. In
+smell there is no notion of relievo, and odour seems to reside not in
+the object smelt, but in the organ. Since I smell a tree at a distance,
+it is comprehensible to me that a person sees it without touching it. I
+am not puzzled over the fact that he receives it as an image on his
+retina without relievo, since my smell perceives the tree as a thin
+sphere with no fullness or content. By themselves, odours suggest
+nothing. I must learn by association to judge from them of distance, of
+place, and of the actions or the surroundings which are the usual
+occasions for them, just as I am told people judge from colour, light,
+and sound.
+
+From exhalations I learn much about people. I often know the work they
+are engaged in. The odours of wood, iron, paint, and drugs cling to the
+garments of those that work in them. Thus I can distinguish the
+carpenter from the ironworker, the artist from the mason or the chemist.
+When a person passes quickly from one place to another I get a scent
+impression of where he has been--the kitchen, the garden, or the
+sick-room. I gain pleasurable ideas of freshness and good taste from the
+odours of soap, toilet water, clean garments, woollen and silk stuffs,
+and gloves.
+
+I have not, indeed, the all-knowing scent of the hound or the wild
+animal. None but the halt and the blind need fear my skill in pursuit;
+for there are other things besides water, stale trails, confusing cross
+tracks to put me at fault. Nevertheless, human odours are as varied and
+capable of recognition as hands and faces. The dear odours of those I
+love are so definite, so unmistakable, that nothing can quite obliterate
+them. If many years should elapse before I saw an intimate friend again,
+I think I should recognize his odour instantly in the heart of Africa,
+as promptly as would my brother that barks.
+
+Once, long ago, in a crowded railway station, a lady kissed me as she
+hurried by. I had not touched even her dress. But she left a scent with
+her kiss which gave me a glimpse of her. The years are many since she
+kissed me. Yet her odour is fresh in my memory.
+
+It is difficult to put into words the thing itself, the elusive
+person-odour. There seems to be no adequate vocabulary of smells, and I
+must fall back on approximate phrase and metaphor.
+
+Some people have a vague, unsubstantial odour that floats about, mocking
+every effort to identify it. It is the will-o'-the-wisp of my olfactive
+experience. Sometimes I meet one who lacks a distinctive person-scent,
+and I seldom find such a one lively or entertaining. On the other hand,
+one who has a pungent odour often possesses great vitality, energy, and
+vigour of mind.
+
+Masculine exhalations are as a rule stronger, more vivid, more widely
+differentiated than those of women. In the odour of young men there is
+something elemental, as of fire, storm, and salt sea. It pulsates with
+buoyancy and desire. It suggests all things strong and beautiful and
+joyous, and gives me a sense of physical happiness. I wonder if others
+observe that all infants have the same scent--pure, simple,
+undecipherable as their dormant personality. It is not until the age of
+six or seven that they begin to have perceptible individual odours.
+These develop and mature along with their mental and bodily powers.
+
+What I have written about smell, especially person-smell, will perhaps
+be regarded as the abnormal sentiment of one who can have no idea of the
+"world of reality and beauty which the eye perceives." There are people
+who are colour-blind, people who are tone-deaf. Most people are
+smell-blind-and-deaf. We should not condemn a musical composition on the
+testimony of an ear which cannot distinguish one chord from another, or
+judge a picture by the verdict of a colour-blind critic. The sensations
+of smell which cheer, inform, and broaden my life are not less pleasant
+merely because some critic who treads the wide, bright pathway of the
+eye has not cultivated his olfactive sense. Without the shy, fugitive,
+often unobserved sensations and the certainties which taste, smell, and
+touch give me, I should be obliged to take my conception of the universe
+wholly from others. I should lack the alchemy by which I now infuse into
+my world light, colour, and the Protean spark. The sensuous reality
+which interthreads and supports all the gropings of my imagination would
+be shattered. The solid earth would melt from under my feet and disperse
+itself in space. The objects dear to my hands would become formless,
+dead things, and I should walk among them as among invisible ghosts.
+
+
+
+
+RELATIVE VALUES OF THE SENSES
+
+
+
+
+VII
+
+RELATIVE VALUES OF THE SENSES
+
+
+I WAS once without the sense of smell and taste for several days. It
+seemed incredible, this utter detachment from odours, to breathe the air
+in and observe never a single scent. The feeling was probably similar,
+though less in degree, to that of one who first loses sight and cannot
+but expect to see the light again any day, any minute. I knew I should
+smell again some time. Still, after the wonder had passed off, a
+loneliness crept over me as vast as the air whose myriad odours I
+missed. The multitudinous subtle delights that smell makes mine became
+for a time wistful memories. When I recovered the lost sense, my heart
+bounded with gladness. It is a fine dramatic touch that Hans Andersen
+gives to the story of Kay and Gerda in the passage about flowers. Kay,
+whom the wicked magician's glass has blinded to human love, rushes away
+fiercely from home when he discovers that the roses have lost their
+sweetness.
+
+The loss of smell for a few days gave me a clearer idea than I had ever
+had what it is to be blinded suddenly, helplessly. With a little stretch
+of the imagination I knew then what it must be when the great curtain
+shuts out suddenly the light of day, the stars, and the firmament
+itself. I see the blind man's eyes strain for the light, as he fearfully
+tries to walk his old rounds, until the unchanging blank that
+everywhere spreads before him stamps the reality of the dark upon his
+consciousness.
+
+My temporary loss of smell proved to me, too, that the absence of a
+sense need not dull the mental faculties and does not distort one's view
+of the world, and so I reason that blindness and deafness need not
+pervert the inner order of the intellect. I know that if there were no
+odours for me I should still possess a considerable part of the world.
+Novelties and surprises would abound, adventures would thicken in the
+dark.
+
+In my classification of the senses, smell is a little the ear's
+inferior, and touch is a great deal the eye's superior. I find that
+great artists and philosophers agree with me in this. Diderot says:
+
+          Je trouvais que de tous les sens, l'oeil etait le
+          plus superficiel; l'oreille, le plus orgueilleux;
+          l'odorat, le plus voluptueux; le gout, le plus
+          superstitieux et le plus inconstant; le toucher,
+          le plus profond et le plus philosophe.[C]
+
+A friend whom I have never seen sends me a quotation from Symonds's
+"Renaissance in Italy":
+
+          Lorenzo Ghiberti, after describing a piece of
+          antique sculpture he saw in Rome adds, "To express
+          the perfection of learning, mastery, and art
+          displayed in it is beyond the power of language.
+          Its more exquisite beauties could not be
+          discovered by the sight, but only by the touch of
+          the hand passed over it." Of another classic
+          marble at Padua he says, "This statue, when the
+          Christian faith triumphed, was hidden in that
+          place by some gentle soul, who, seeing it so
+          perfect, fashioned with art so wonderful, and with
+          such power of genius, and being moved to reverent
+          pity, caused a sepulchre 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 the blind is immense, irreparable. But it does not take
+away our share of the things that count--service, friendship, humour,
+imagination, wisdom. It is the secret inner will that controls one's
+fate. We are capable of willing to be good, of loving and being loved,
+of thinking to the end that we may be wiser. We possess these
+spirit-born forces equally with all God's children. Therefore we, too,
+see the lightnings and hear the thunders of Sinai. We, too, march
+through the wilderness and the solitary place that shall be glad for us,
+and as we pass, God maketh the desert to blossom like the rose. We, too,
+go in unto the Promised Land to possess the treasures of the spirit, the
+unseen permanence of life and nature.
+
+The blind man of spirit faces the unknown and grapples with it, and what
+else does the world of seeing men do? He has imagination, sympathy,
+humanity, and these ineradicable existences compel him to share by a
+sort of proxy in a sense he has not. When he meets terms of colour,
+light, physiognomy, he guesses, divines, puzzles out their meaning by
+analogies drawn from the senses he has. I naturally tend to think,
+reason, draw inferences as if I had five senses instead of three. This
+tendency is beyond my control; it is involuntary, habitual, instinctive.
+I cannot compel my mind to say "I feel" instead of "I see" or "I hear."
+The word "feel" proves on examination to be no less a convention than
+"see" and "hear" when I seek for words accurately to describe the
+outward things that affect my three bodily senses. When a man loses a
+leg, his brain persists in impelling him to use what he has not and yet
+feels to be there. Can it be that the brain is so constituted that it
+will continue the activity which animates the sight and the hearing,
+after the eye and the ear have been destroyed?
+
+It might seem that the five senses would work intelligently together
+only when resident in the same body. Yet when two or three are left
+unaided, they reach out for their complements in another body, and find
+that they yoke easily with the borrowed team. When my hand aches from
+overtouching, I find relief in the sight of another. When my mind lags,
+wearied with the strain of forcing out thoughts about dark, musicless,
+colourless, detached substance, it recovers its elasticity as soon as I
+resort to the powers of another mind which commands light, harmony,
+colour. Now, if the five senses will not remain disassociated, the life
+of the deaf-blind cannot be severed from the life of the seeing, hearing
+race.
+
+The deaf-blind person may be plunged and replunged like Schiller's
+diver into seas of the unknown. But, unlike the doomed hero, he returns
+triumphant, grasping the priceless truth that his mind is not crippled,
+not limited to the infirmity of his senses. The world of the eye and the
+ear becomes to him a subject of fateful interest. He seizes every word
+of sight and hearing because his sensations compel it. Light and colour,
+of which he has no tactual evidence, he studies fearlessly, believing
+that all humanly knowable truth is open to him. He is in a position
+similar to that of the astronomer who, firm, patient, watches a star
+night after night for many years and feels rewarded if he discovers a
+single fact about it. The man deaf-blind to ordinary outward things, and
+the man deaf-blind to the immeasurable universe, are both limited by
+time and space; but they have made a compact to wring service from their
+limitations.
+
+The bulk of the world's knowledge is an imaginary construction. History
+is but a mode of imagining, of making us see civilizations that no
+longer appear upon the earth. Some of the most significant discoveries
+in modern science owe their origin to the imagination of men who had
+neither accurate knowledge nor exact instruments to demonstrate their
+beliefs. If astronomy had not kept always in advance of the telescope,
+no one would ever have thought a telescope worth making. What great
+invention has not existed in the inventor's mind long before he gave it
+tangible shape?
+
+A more splendid example of imaginative knowledge is the unity with which
+philosophers start their study of the world. They can never perceive the
+world in its entire reality. Yet their imagination, with its magnificent
+allowance for error, its power of treating uncertainty as negligible,
+has pointed the way for empirical knowledge.
+
+In their highest creative moments the great poet, the great musician
+cease to use the crude instruments of sight and hearing. They break away
+from their sense-moorings, rise on strong, compelling wings of spirit
+far above our misty hills and darkened valleys into the region of light,
+music, intellect.
+
+What eye hath seen the glories of the New Jerusalem? What ear hath heard
+the music of the spheres, the steps of time, the strokes of chance, the
+blows of death? Men have not heard with their physical sense the tumult
+of sweet voices above the hills of Judea nor seen the heavenly vision;
+but millions have listened to that spiritual message through many ages.
+
+Our blindness changes not a whit the course of inner realities. Of us it
+is as true as it is of the seeing that the most beautiful world is
+always entered through the imagination. If you wish to be something that
+you are not,--something fine, noble, good,--you shut your eyes, and for
+one dreamy moment you are that which you long to be.
+
+
+
+
+INWARD VISIONS
+
+
+
+
+IX
+
+INWARD VISIONS
+
+
+ACCORDING to all art, all nature, all coherent human thought, we know
+that order, proportion, form, are essential elements of beauty. Now
+order, proportion, and form, are palpable to the touch. But beauty and
+rhythm are deeper than sense. They are like love and faith. They spring
+out of a spiritual process only slightly dependent upon sensations.
+Order, proportion, form, cannot generate in the mind the abstract idea
+of beauty, unless there is already a soul intelligence to breathe life
+into the elements. Many persons, having perfect eyes, are blind in
+their perceptions. Many persons, having perfect ears, are emotionally
+deaf. Yet these are the very ones who dare to set limits to the vision
+of those who, lacking a sense or two, have will, soul, passion,
+imagination. Faith is a mockery if it teaches us not that we may
+construct a world unspeakably more complete and beautiful than the
+material world. And I, too, may construct my better world, for I am a
+child of God, an inheritor of a fragment of the Mind that created all
+worlds.
+
+There is a consonance of all things, a blending of all that we know
+about the material world and the spiritual. It consists for me of all
+the impressions, vibrations, heat, cold, taste, smell, and the
+sensations which these convey to the mind, infinitely combined,
+interwoven with associated ideas and acquired knowledge. No thoughtful
+person will believe that what I said about the meaning of footsteps is
+strictly true of mere jolts and jars. It is an array of the spiritual in
+certain natural elements, tactual beats, and an acquired knowledge of
+physical habits and moral traits of highly organized human beings. What
+would odours signify if they were not associated with the time of the
+year, the place I live in, and the people I know?
+
+The result of such a blending is sometimes a discordant trying of
+strings far removed from a melody, very far from a symphony. (For the
+benefit of those who must be reassured, I will say that I have felt a
+musician tuning his violin, that I have read about a symphony, and so
+have a fair intellectual perception of my metaphor.) But with training
+and experience the faculties gather up the stray notes and combine them
+into a full, harmonious whole. If the person who accomplishes this task
+is peculiarly gifted, we call him a poet. The blind and the deaf are not
+great poets, it is true. Yet now and again you find one deaf and blind
+who has attained to his royal kingdom of beauty.
+
+I have a little volume of poems by a deaf-blind lady, Madame Bertha
+Galeron. Her poetry has versatility of thought. Now it is tender and
+sweet, now full of tragic passion and the sternness of destiny. Victor
+Hugo called her "La Grande Voyante." She has written several plays, two
+of which have been acted in Paris. The French Academy has crowned her
+work.
+
+The infinite wonders of the universe are revealed to us in exact measure
+as we are capable of receiving them. The keenness of our vision depends
+not on how much we can see, but on how much we feel. Nor yet does mere
+knowledge create beauty. Nature sings her most exquisite songs to those
+who love her. She does not unfold her secrets to those who come only to
+gratify their desire of analysis, to gather facts, but to those who see
+in her manifold phenomena suggestions of lofty, delicate sentiments.
+
+[Illustration: Copyright, 1907, by The Whitman Studio
+
+The Little Boy Next Door
+
+To face page 120]
+
+Am I to be denied the use of such adjectives as "freshness" and
+"sparkle," "dark" and "gloomy"? I have walked in the fields at early
+morning. I have felt a rose-bush laden with dew and fragrance. I have
+felt the curves and graces of my kitten at play. I have known the
+sweet, shy ways of little children. I have known the sad opposites of
+all these, a ghastly touch picture. Remember, I have sometimes travelled
+over a dusty road as far as my feet could go. At a sudden turn I have
+stepped upon starved, ignoble weeds, and reaching out my hands, I have
+touched a fair tree out of which a parasite had taken the life like a
+vampire. I have touched a pretty bird whose soft wings hung limp, whose
+little heart beat no more. I have wept over the feebleness and deformity
+of a child, lame, or born blind, or, worse still, mindless. If I had the
+genius of Thomson, I, too, could depict a "City of Dreadful Night" from
+mere touch sensations. From contrasts so irreconcilable can we fail to
+form an idea of beauty and know surely when we meet with loveliness?
+
+Here is a sonnet eloquent of a blind man's power of vision:
+
+
+              THE MOUNTAIN TO THE PINE
+
+          Thou tall, majestic monarch of the wood,
+            That standest where no wild vines dare to creep,
+          Men call thee old, and say that thou hast stood
+            A century upon my rugged steep;
+          Yet unto me thy life is but a day,
+            When I recall the things that I have seen,--
+          The forest monarchs that have passed away
+            Upon the spot where first I saw thy green;
+          For I am older than the age of man,
+            Or all the living things that crawl or creep,
+            Or birds of air, or creatures of the deep;
+          I was the first dim outline of God's plan:
+            Only the waters of the restless sea
+            And the infinite stars in heaven are old to me.
+
+I am glad my friend Mr. Stedman knew that poem while he was making his
+Anthology, for knowing it, so fine a poet and critic could not fail to
+give it a place in his treasure-house of American poetry. The poet, Mr.
+Clarence Hawkes, has been blind since childhood; yet he finds in nature
+hints of combinations for his mental pictures. Out of the knowledge and
+impressions that come to him he constructs a masterpiece which hangs
+upon the walls of his thought. And into the poet's house come all the
+true spirits of the world.
+
+It was a rare poet who thought of the mountain as "the first dim outline
+of God's plan." That is the real wonder of the poem, and not that a
+blind man should speak so confidently of sky and sea. Our ideas of the
+sky are an accumulation of touch-glimpses, literary allusions, and the
+observations of others, with an emotional blending of all. My face feels
+only a tiny portion of the atmosphere; but I go through continuous space
+and feel the air at every point, every instant. I have been told about
+the distances from our earth to the sun, to the other planets, and to
+the fixed stars. I multiply a thousand times the utmost height and width
+that my touch compasses, and thus I gain a deep sense of the sky's
+immensity.
+
+Move me along constantly over water, water, nothing but water, and you
+give me the solitude, the vastness of ocean which fills the eye. I have
+been in a little sail-boat on the sea, when the rising tide swept it
+toward the shore. May I not understand the poet's figure: "The green of
+spring overflows the earth like a tide"? I have felt the flame of a
+candle blow and flutter in the breeze. May I not, then, say: "Myriads of
+fireflies flit hither and thither in the dew-wet grass like little
+fluttering tapers"?
+
+Combine the endless space of air, the sun's warmth, the clouds that are
+described to my understanding spirit, the frequent breaking through the
+soil of a brook or the expanse of the wind-ruffled lake, the tactual
+undulation of the hills, which I recall when I am far away from them,
+the towering trees upon trees as I walk by them, the bearings that I try
+to keep while others tell me the directions of the various points of the
+scenery, and you will begin to feel surer of my mental landscape. The
+utmost bound to which my thought will go with clearness is the horizon
+of my mind. From this horizon I imagine the one which the eye marks.
+
+Touch cannot bridge distance,--it is fit only for the contact of
+surfaces,--but thought leaps the chasm. For this reason I am able to use
+words descriptive of objects distant from my senses. I have felt the
+rondure of the infant's tender form. I can apply this perception to the
+landscape and to the far-off hills.
+
+
+
+
+ANALOGIES IN SENSE PERCEPTION
+
+
+
+
+X
+
+ANALOGIES IN SENSE PERCEPTION
+
+
+I HAVE not touched the outline of a star nor the glory of the moon, but
+I believe that God has set two lights in mind, the greater to rule by
+day and the lesser by night, and by them I know that I am able to
+navigate my life-bark, as certain of reaching the haven as he who steers
+by the North Star. Perhaps my sun shines not as yours. The colours that
+glorify my world, the blue of the sky, the green of the fields, may not
+correspond exactly with those you delight in; but they are none the less
+colour to me. The sun does not shine for my physical eyes, nor does the
+lightning flash, nor do the trees turn green in the spring; but they
+have not therefore ceased to exist, any more than the landscape is
+annihilated when you turn your back on it.
+
+I understand how scarlet can differ from crimson because I know that the
+smell of an orange is not the smell of a grape-fruit. I can also
+conceive that colours have shades, and guess what shades are. In smell
+and taste there are varieties not broad enough to be fundamental; so I
+call them shades. There are half a dozen roses near me. They all have
+the unmistakable rose scent; yet my nose tells me that they are not the
+same. The American Beauty is distinct from the Jacqueminot and La
+France. Odours in certain grasses fade as really to my sense as certain
+colours do to yours in the sun. The freshness of a flower in my hand is
+analogous to the freshness I taste in an apple newly picked. I make use
+of analogies like these to enlarge my conceptions of colours. Some
+analogies which I draw between qualities in surface and vibration, taste
+and smell, are drawn by others between sight, hearing, and touch. This
+fact encourages me to persevere, to try and bridge the gap between the
+eye and the hand.
+
+Certainly I get far enough to sympathize with the delight that my kind
+feel in beauty they see and harmony they hear. This bond between
+humanity and me is worth keeping, even if the idea on which I base it
+prove erroneous.
+
+Sweet, beautiful vibrations exist for my touch, even though they travel
+through other substances than air to reach me. So I imagine sweet,
+delightful sounds, and the artistic arrangement of them which is called
+music, and I remember that they travel through the air to the ear,
+conveying impressions somewhat like mine. I also know what tones are,
+since they are perceptible tactually in a voice. Now, heat varies
+greatly in the sun, in the fire, in hands, and in the fur of animals;
+indeed, there is such a thing for me as a cold sun. So I think of the
+varieties of light that touch the eye, cold and warm, vivid and dim,
+soft and glaring, but always light, and I imagine their passage through
+the air to an extensive sense, instead of to a narrow one like touch.
+From the experience I have had with voices I guess how the eye
+distinguishes shades in the midst of light. While I read the lips of a
+woman whose voice is soprano, I note a low tone or a glad tone in the
+midst of a high, flowing voice. When I feel my cheeks hot, I know that I
+am red. I have talked so much and read so much about colours that
+through no will of my own I attach meanings to them, just as all people
+attach certain meanings to abstract terms like hope, idealism,
+monotheism, intellect, which cannot be represented truly by visible
+objects, but which are understood from analogies between immaterial
+concepts and the ideas they awaken of external things. The force of
+association drives me to say that white is exalted and pure, green is
+exuberant, red suggests love or shame or strength. Without the colour or
+its equivalent, life to me would be dark, barren, a vast blackness.
+
+Thus through an inner law of completeness my thoughts are not permitted
+to remain colourless. It strains my mind to separate colour and sound
+from objects. Since my education began I have always had things
+described to me with their colours and sounds by one with keen senses
+and a fine feeling for the significant. Therefore I habitually think of
+things as coloured and resonant. Habit accounts for part. The soul sense
+accounts for another part. The brain with its five-sensed construction
+asserts its right and accounts for the rest. Inclusive of all, the unity
+of the world demands that colour be kept in it, whether I have
+cognizance of it or not. Rather than be shut out, I take part in it by
+discussing it, imagining it, happy in the happiness of those near me
+who gaze at the lovely hues of the sunset or the rainbow.
+
+My hand has its share in this multiple knowledge, but it must never be
+forgotten that with the fingers I see only a very small portion of a
+surface, and that I must pass my hand continually over it before my
+touch grasps the whole. It is still more important, however, to remember
+that my imagination is not tethered to certain points, locations, and
+distances. It puts all the parts together simultaneously as if it saw or
+knew instead of feeling them. Though I feel only a small part of my
+horse at a time,--my horse is nervous and does not submit to manual
+explorations,--yet, because I have many times felt hock, nose, hoof and
+mane, I can see the steeds of Phoebus Apollo coursing the heavens.
+
+With such a power active it is impossible that my thought should be
+vague, indistinct. It must needs be potent, definite. This is really a
+corollary of the philosophical truth that the real world exists only for
+the mind. That is to say, I can never touch the world in its entirety;
+indeed, I touch less of it than the portion that others see or hear. But
+all creatures, all objects, pass into my brain entire, and occupy the
+same extent there that they do in material space. I declare that for me
+branched thoughts, instead of pines, wave, sway, rustle, make musical
+the ridges of mountains rising summit upon summit. Mention a rose too
+far away for me to smell it. Straightway a scent steals into my
+nostril, a form presses against my palm in all its dilating softness,
+with rounded petals, slightly curled edges, curving stem, leaves
+drooping. When I would fain view the world as a whole, it rushes into
+vision--man, beast, bird, reptile, fly, sky, ocean, mountains, plain,
+rock, pebble. The warmth of life, the reality of creation is over
+all--the throb of human hands, glossiness of fur, lithe windings of long
+bodies, poignant buzzing of insects, the ruggedness of the steeps as I
+climb them, the liquid mobility and boom of waves upon the rocks.
+Strange to say, try as I may, I cannot force my touch to pervade this
+universe in all directions. The moment I try, the whole vanishes; only
+small objects or narrow portions of a surface, mere touch-signs, a chaos
+of things scattered at random, remain. No thrill, no delight is excited
+thereby. Restore to the artistic, comprehensive internal sense its
+rightful domain, and you give me joy which best proves the reality.
+
+
+
+
+BEFORE THE SOUL DAWN
+
+
+
+
+XI
+
+BEFORE THE SOUL DAWN
+
+
+BEFORE my teacher came to me, I did not know that I am. I lived in a
+world that was a no-world. I cannot hope to describe adequately that
+unconscious, yet conscious time of nothingness. I did not know that I
+knew aught, or that I lived or acted or desired. I had neither will nor
+intellect. I was carried along to objects and acts by a certain blind
+natural impetus. I had a mind which caused me to feel anger,
+satisfaction, desire. These two facts led those about me to suppose
+that I willed and thought. I can remember all this, not because I knew
+that it was so, but because I have tactual memory. It enables me to
+remember that I never contracted my forehead in the act of thinking. I
+never viewed anything beforehand or chose it. I also recall tactually
+the fact that never in a start of the body or a heart-beat did I feel
+that I loved or cared for anything. My inner life, then, was a blank
+without past, present, or future, without hope or anticipation, without
+wonder or joy or faith.
+
+          It was not night--it was not day.
+
+                 .       .       .       .       .
+
+          But vacancy absorbing space,
+          And fixedness, without a place;
+          There were no stars--no earth--no time--
+          No check--no change--no good--no crime.
+
+My dormant being had no idea of God or immortality, no fear of death.
+
+I remember, also through touch, that I had a power of association. I
+felt tactual jars like the stamp of a foot, the opening of a window or
+its closing, the slam of a door. After repeatedly smelling rain and
+feeling the discomfort of wetness, I acted like those about me: I ran to
+shut the window. But that was not thought in any sense. It was the same
+kind of association that makes animals take shelter from the rain. From
+the same instinct of aping others, I folded the clothes that came from
+the laundry, and put mine away, fed the turkeys, sewed bead-eyes on my
+doll's face, and did many other things of which I have the tactual
+remembrance. When I wanted anything I liked,--ice-cream, for instance,
+of which I was very fond,--I had a delicious taste on my tongue (which,
+by the way, I never have now), and in my hand I felt the turning of the
+freezer. I made the sign, and my mother knew I wanted ice-cream. I
+"thought" and desired in my fingers. If I had made a man, I should
+certainly have put the brain and soul in his finger-tips. From
+reminiscences like these I conclude that it is the opening of the two
+faculties, freedom of will, or choice, and rationality, or the power of
+thinking from one thing to another, which makes it possible to come into
+being first as a child, afterwards as a man.
+
+Since I had no power of thought, I did not compare one mental state with
+another. So I was not conscious of any change or process going on in my
+brain when my teacher began to instruct me. I merely felt keen delight
+in obtaining more easily what I wanted by means of the finger motions
+she taught me. I thought only of objects, and only objects I wanted. It
+was the turning of the freezer on a larger scale. When I learned the
+meaning of "I" and "me" and found that I was something, I began to
+think. Then consciousness first existed for me. Thus it was not the
+sense of touch that brought me knowledge. It was the awakening of my
+soul that first rendered my senses their value, their cognizance of
+objects, names, qualities, and properties. Thought made me conscious of
+love, joy, and all the emotions. I was eager to know, then to
+understand, afterward to reflect on what I knew and understood, and the
+blind impetus, which had before driven me hither and thither at the
+dictates of my sensations, vanished forever.
+
+I cannot represent more clearly than any one else the gradual and subtle
+changes from first impressions to abstract ideas. But I know that my
+physical ideas, that is, ideas derived from material objects, appear to
+me first an idea similar to those of touch. Instantly they pass into
+intellectual meanings. Afterward the meaning finds expression in what is
+called "inner speech." When I was a child, my inner speech was inner
+spelling. Although I am even now frequently caught spelling to myself on
+my fingers, yet I talk to myself, too, with my lips, and it is true that
+when I first learned to speak, my mind discarded the finger-symbols and
+began to articulate. However, when I try to recall what some one has
+said to me, I am conscious of a hand spelling into mine.
+
+It has often been asked what were my earliest impressions of the world
+in which I found myself. But one who thinks at all of his first
+impressions knows what a riddle this is. Our impressions grow and change
+unnoticed, so that what we suppose we thought as children may be quite
+different from what we actually experienced in our childhood. I only
+know that after my education began the world which came within my reach
+was all alive. I spelled to my blocks and my dogs. I sympathized with
+plants when the flowers were picked, because I thought it hurt them,
+and that they grieved for their lost blossoms. It was two years before I
+could be made to believe that my dogs did not understand what I said,
+and I always apologized to them when I ran into or stepped on them.
+
+As my experiences broadened and deepened, the indeterminate, poetic
+feelings of childhood began to fix themselves in definite thoughts.
+Nature--the world I could touch--was folded and filled with myself. I am
+inclined to believe those philosophers who declare that we know nothing
+but our own feelings and ideas. With a little ingenious reasoning one
+may see in the material world simply a mirror, an image of permanent
+mental sensations. In either sphere self-knowledge is the condition and
+the limit of our consciousness. That is why, perhaps, many people know
+so little about what is beyond their short range of experience. They
+look within themselves--and find nothing! Therefore they conclude that
+there is nothing outside themselves, either.
+
+However that may be, I came later to look for an image of my emotions
+and sensations in others. I had to learn the outward signs of inward
+feelings. The start of fear, the suppressed, controlled tensity of pain,
+the beat of happy muscles in others, had to be perceived and compared
+with my own experiences before I could trace them back to the intangible
+soul of another. Groping, uncertain, I at last found my identity, and
+after seeing my thoughts and feelings repeated in others, I gradually
+constructed my world of men and of God. As I read and study, I find
+that this is what the rest of the race has done. Man looks within
+himself and in time finds the measure and the meaning of the universe.
+
+
+
+
+THE LARGER SANCTIONS
+
+
+
+
+XII
+
+THE LARGER SANCTIONS
+
+
+SO, in the midst of life, eager, imperious life, the deaf-blind child,
+fettered to the bare rock of circumstance, spider-like, sends out
+gossamer threads of thought into the measureless void that surrounds
+him. Patiently he explores the dark, until he builds up a knowledge of
+the world he lives in, and his soul meets the beauty of the world, where
+the sun shines always, and the birds sing. To the blind child the dark
+is kindly. In it he finds nothing extraordinary or terrible. It is his
+familiar world; even the groping from place to place, the halting
+steps, the dependence upon others, do not seem strange to him. He does
+not know how many countless pleasures the dark shuts out from him. Not
+until he weighs his life in the scale of others' experience does he
+realize what it is to live forever in the dark. But the knowledge that
+teaches him this bitterness also brings its consolation--spiritual
+light, the promise of the day that shall be.
+
+The blind child--the deaf-blind child--has inherited the mind of seeing
+and hearing ancestors--a mind measured to five senses. Therefore he must
+be influenced, even if it be unknown to himself, by the light, colour,
+song which have been transmitted through the language he is taught, for
+the chambers of the mind are ready to receive that language. The brain
+of the race is so permeated with colour that it dyes even the speech of
+the blind. Every object I think of is stained with the hue that belongs
+to it by association and memory. The experience of the deaf-blind
+person, in a world of seeing, hearing people, is like that of a sailor
+on an island where the inhabitants speak a language unknown to him,
+whose life is unlike that he has lived. He is one, they are many; there
+is no chance of compromise. He must learn to see with their eyes, to
+hear with their ears, to think their thoughts, to follow their ideals.
+
+If the dark, silent world which surrounds him were essentially different
+from the sunlit, resonant world, it would be incomprehensible to his
+kind, and could never be discussed. If his feelings and sensations were
+fundamentally different from those of others, they would be
+inconceivable except to those who had similar sensations and feelings.
+If the mental consciousness of the deaf-blind person were absolutely
+dissimilar to that of his fellows, he would have no means of imagining
+what they think. Since the mind of the sightless is essentially the same
+as that of the seeing in that it admits of no lack, it must supply some
+sort of equivalent for missing physical sensations. It must perceive a
+likeness between things outward and things inward, a correspondence
+between the seen and the unseen. I make use of such a correspondence in
+many relations, and no matter how far I pursue it to things I cannot
+see, it does not break under the test.
+
+As a working hypothesis, correspondence is adequate to all life, through
+the whole range of phenomena. The flash of thought and its swiftness
+explain the lightning flash and the sweep of a comet through the
+heavens. My mental sky opens to me the vast celestial spaces, and I
+proceed to fill them with the images of my spiritual stars. I recognize
+truth by the clearness and guidance that it gives my thought, and,
+knowing what that clearness is, I can imagine what light is to the eye.
+It is not a convention of language, but a forcible feeling of the
+reality, that at times makes me start when I say, "Oh, I see my
+mistake!" or "How dark, cheerless is his life!" I know these are
+metaphors. Still, I must prove with them, since there is nothing in our
+language to replace them. Deaf-blind metaphors to correspond do not
+exist and are not necessary. Because I can understand the word "reflect"
+figuratively, a mirror has never perplexed me. The manner in which my
+imagination perceives absent things enables me to see how glasses can
+magnify things, bring them nearer, or remove them farther.
+
+Deny me this correspondence, this internal sense, confine me to the
+fragmentary, incoherent touch-world, and lo, I become as a bat which
+wanders about on the wing. Suppose I omitted all words of seeing,
+hearing, colour, light, landscape, the thousand phenomena, instruments
+and beauties connected with them. I should suffer a great diminution of
+the wonder and delight in attaining knowledge; also--more dreadful
+loss--my emotions would be blunted, so that I could not be touched by
+things unseen.
+
+Has anything arisen to disprove the adequacy of correspondence? Has any
+chamber of the blind man's brain been opened and found empty? Has any
+psychologist explored the mind of the sightless and been able to say,
+"There is no sensation here"?
+
+I tread the solid earth; I breathe the scented air. Out of these two
+experiences I form numberless associations and correspondences. I
+observe, I feel, I think, I imagine. I associate the countless varied
+impressions, experiences, concepts. Out of these materials Fancy, the
+cunning artisan of the brain, welds an image which the sceptic would
+deny me, because I cannot see with my physical eyes the changeful,
+lovely face of my thought-child. He would break the mind's mirror. This
+spirit-vandal would humble my soul and force me to bite the dust of
+material things. While I champ the bit of circumstance, he scourges and
+goads me with the spur of fact. If I heeded him, the sweet-visaged earth
+would vanish into nothing, and I should hold in my hand nought but an
+aimless, soulless lump of dead matter. But although the body physical is
+rooted alive to the Promethean rock, the spirit-proud huntress of the
+air will still pursue the shining, open highways of the universe.
+
+Blindness has no limiting effect upon mental vision. My intellectual
+horizon is infinitely wide. The universe it encircles is immeasurable.
+Would they who bid me keep within the narrow bound of my meagre senses
+demand of Herschel that he roof his stellar universe and give us back
+Plato's solid firmament of glassy spheres? Would they command Darwin
+from the grave and bid him blot out his geological time, give us back a
+paltry few thousand years? Oh, the supercilious doubters! They ever
+strive to clip the upward daring wings of the spirit.
+
+A person deprived of one or more senses is not, as many seem to think,
+turned out into a trackless wilderness without landmark or guide. The
+blind man carries with him into his dark environment all the faculties
+essential to the apprehension of the visible world whose door is closed
+behind him. He finds his surroundings everywhere homogeneous with those
+of the sunlit world; for there is an inexhaustible ocean of likenesses
+between the world within, and the world without, and these likenesses,
+these correspondences, he finds equal to every exigency his life offers.
+
+The necessity of some such thing as correspondence or symbolism appears
+more and more urgent as we consider the duties that religion and
+philosophy enjoin upon us.
+
+The blind are expected to read the Bible as a means of attaining
+spiritual happiness. Now, the Bible is filled throughout with references
+to clouds, stars, colours, and beauty, and often the mention of these is
+essential to the meaning of the parable or the message in which they
+occur. Here one must needs see the inconsistency of people who believe
+in the Bible, and yet deny us a right to talk about what we do not see,
+and for that matter what _they_ do not see, either. Who shall forbid my
+heart to sing: "Yea, he did fly upon the wings of the wind. He made
+darkness his secret place; his pavilion round about him were dark waters
+and thick clouds of the skies"?
+
+Philosophy constantly points out the untrustworthiness of the five
+senses and the important work of reason which corrects the errors of
+sight and reveals its illusions. If we cannot depend on five senses, how
+much less may we rely on three! What ground have we for discarding
+light, sound, and colour as an integral part of our world? How are we to
+know that they have ceased to exist for us? We must take their reality
+for granted, even as the philosopher assumes the reality of the world
+without being able to see it physically as a whole.
+
+Ancient philosophy offers an argument which seems still valid. There is
+in the blind as in the seeing an Absolute which gives truth to what we
+know to be true, order to what is orderly, beauty to the beautiful,
+touchableness to what is tangible. If this is granted, it follows that
+this Absolute is not imperfect, incomplete, partial. It must needs go
+beyond the limited evidence of our sensations, and also give light to
+what is invisible, music to the musical that silence dulls. Thus mind
+itself compels us to acknowledge that we are in a world of intellectual
+order, beauty, and harmony. The essences, or absolutes of these ideas,
+necessarily dispel their opposites which belong with evil, disorder and
+discord. Thus deafness and blindness do not exist in the immaterial
+mind, which is philosophically the real world, but are banished with the
+perishable material senses. Reality, of which visible things are the
+symbol, shines before my mind. While I walk about my chamber with
+unsteady steps, my spirit sweeps skyward on eagle wings and looks out
+with unquenchable vision upon the world of eternal beauty.
+
+
+
+
+THE DREAM WORLD
+
+
+
+
+XIII
+
+THE DREAM WORLD
+
+
+EVERYBODY takes his own dreams seriously, but yawns at the
+breakfast-table when somebody else begins to tell the adventures of the
+night before. I hesitate, therefore, to enter upon an account of my
+dreams; for it is a literary sin to bore the reader, and a scientific
+sin to report the facts of a far country with more regard to point and
+brevity than to complete and literal truth. The psychologists have
+trained a pack of theories and facts which they keep in leash, like so
+many bulldogs, and which they let loose upon us whenever we depart from
+the straight and narrow path of dream probability. One may not even tell
+an entertaining dream without being suspected of having liberally edited
+it,--as if editing were one of the seven deadly sins, instead of a
+useful and honourable occupation! Be it understood, then, that I am
+discoursing at my own breakfast-table, and that no scientific man is
+present to trip the autocrat.
+
+I used to wonder why scientific men and others were always asking me
+about my dreams. But I am not surprised now, since I have discovered
+what some of them believe to be the ordinary waking experience of one
+who is both deaf and blind. They think that I can know very little about
+objects even a few feet beyond the reach of my arms. Everything outside
+of myself, according to them, is a hazy blur. Trees, mountains, cities,
+the ocean, even the house I live in are but fairy fabrications, misty
+unrealities. Therefore it is assumed that my dreams should have peculiar
+interest for the man of science. In some undefined way it is expected
+that they should reveal the world I dwell in to be flat, formless,
+colourless, without perspective, with little thickness and less
+solidity--a vast solitude of soundless space. But who shall put into
+words limitless, visionless, silent void? One should be a disembodied
+spirit indeed to make anything out of such insubstantial experiences. A
+world, or a dream for that matter, to be comprehensible to us, must, I
+should think, have a warp of substance woven into the woof of fantasy.
+We cannot imagine even in dreams an object which has no counterpart in
+reality. Ghosts always resemble somebody, and if they do not appear
+themselves, their presence is indicated by circumstances with which we
+are perfectly familiar.
+
+During sleep we enter a strange, mysterious realm which science has thus
+far not explored. Beyond the border-line of slumber the investigator may
+not pass with his common-sense rule and test. Sleep with softest touch
+locks all the gates of our physical senses and lulls to rest the
+conscious will--the disciplinarian of our waking thoughts. Then the
+spirit wrenches itself free from the sinewy arms of reason and like a
+winged courser spurns the firm green earth and speeds away upon wind
+and cloud, leaving neither trace nor footprint by which science may
+track its flight and bring us knowledge of the distant, shadowy country
+that we nightly visit. When we come back from the dream-realm, we can
+give no reasonable report of what we met there. But once across the
+border, we feel at home as if we had always lived there and had never
+made any excursions into this rational daylight world.
+
+My dreams do not seem to differ very much from the dreams of other
+people. Some of them are coherent and safely hitched to an event or a
+conclusion. Others are inconsequent and fantastic. All attest that in
+Dreamland there is no such thing as repose. We are always up and doing
+with a mind for any adventure. We act, strive, think, suffer and are
+glad to no purpose. We leave outside the portals of Sleep all
+troublesome incredulities and vexatious speculations as to probability.
+I float wraith-like upon clouds in and out among the winds, without the
+faintest notion that I am doing anything unusual. In Dreamland I find
+little that is altogether strange or wholly new to my experience. No
+matter what happens, I am not astonished, however extraordinary the
+circumstances may be. I visit a foreign land where I have not been in
+reality, and I converse with peoples whose language I have never heard.
+Yet we manage to understand each other perfectly. Into whatsoever
+situation or society my wanderings bring me, there is the same
+homogeneity. If I happen into Vagabondia, I make merry with the jolly
+folk of the road or the tavern.
+
+I do not remember ever to have met persons with whom I could not at once
+communicate, or to have been shocked or surprised at the doings of my
+dream-companions. In its strange wanderings in those dusky groves of
+Slumberland my soul takes everything for granted and adapts itself to
+the wildest phantoms. I am seldom confused. Everything is as clear as
+day. I know events the instant they take place, and wherever I turn my
+steps, Mind is my faithful guide and interpreter.
+
+I suppose every one has had in a dream the exasperating, profitless
+experience of seeking something urgently desired at the moment, and the
+aching, weary sensation that follows each failure to track the thing to
+its hiding-place. Sometimes with a singing dizziness in my head I climb
+and climb, I know not where or why. Yet I cannot quit the torturing,
+passionate endeavour, though again and again I reach out blindly for an
+object to hold to. Of course according to the perversity of dreams there
+is no object near. I clutch empty air, and then I fall downward, and
+still downward, and in the midst of the fall I dissolve into the
+atmosphere upon which I have been floating so precariously.
+
+Some of my dreams seem to be traced one within another like a series of
+concentric circles. In sleep I think I cannot sleep. I toss about in the
+toils of tasks unfinished. I decide to get up and read for a while. I
+know the shelf in my library where I keep the book I want. The book has
+no name, but I find it without difficulty. I settle myself comfortably
+in the morris-chair, the great book open on my knee. Not a word can I
+make out, the pages are utterly blank. I am not surprised, but keenly
+disappointed. I finger the pages, I bend over them lovingly, the tears
+fall on my hands. I shut the book quickly as the thought passes through
+my mind, "The print will be all rubbed out if I get it wet." Yet there
+is no print tangible on the page!
+
+This morning I thought that I awoke. I was certain that I had overslept.
+I seized my watch, and sure enough, it pointed to an hour after my
+rising time. I sprang up in the greatest hurry, knowing that breakfast
+was ready. I called my mother, who declared that my watch must be
+wrong. She was positive it could not be so late. I looked at my watch
+again, and lo! the hands wiggled, whirled, buzzed and disappeared. I
+awoke more fully as my dismay grew, until I was at the antipodes of
+sleep. Finally my eyes opened actually, and I knew that I had been
+dreaming. I had only waked into sleep. What is still more bewildering,
+there is no difference between the consciousness of the sham waking and
+that of the real one.
+
+It is fearful to think that all that we have ever seen, felt, read, and
+done may suddenly rise to our dream-vision, as the sea casts up objects
+it has swallowed. I have held a little child in my arms in the midst of
+a riot and spoken vehemently, imploring the Russian soldiers not to
+massacre the Jews. I have re-lived the agonizing scenes of the Sepoy
+Rebellion and the French Revolution. Cities have burned before my eyes,
+and I have fought the flames until I fell exhausted. Holocausts overtake
+the world, and I struggle in vain to save my friends.
+
+Once in a dream a message came speeding over land and sea that winter
+was descending upon the world from the North Pole, that the Arctic zone
+was shifting to our mild climate. Far and wide the message flew. The
+ocean was congealed in midsummer. Ships were held fast in the ice by
+thousands, the ships with large, white sails were held fast. Riches of
+the Orient and the plenteous harvests of the Golden West might no more
+pass between nation and nation. For some time the trees and flowers
+grew on, despite the intense cold. Birds flew into the houses for
+safety, and those which winter had overtaken lay on the snow with wings
+spread in vain flight. At last the foliage and blossoms fell at the feet
+of Winter. The petals of the flowers were turned to rubies and
+sapphires. The leaves froze into emeralds. The trees moaned and tossed
+their branches as the frost pierced them through bark and sap, pierced
+into their very roots. I shivered myself awake, and with a tumult of joy
+I breathed the many sweet morning odours wakened by the summer sun.
+
+One need not visit an African jungle or an Indian forest to hunt the
+tiger. One can lie in bed amid downy pillows and dream tigers as
+terrible as any in the pathless wild. I was a little girl when one night
+I tried to cross the garden in front of my aunt's house in Alabama. I
+was in pursuit of a large cat with a great bushy tail. A few hours
+before he had clawed my little canary out of its cage and crunched it
+between his cruel teeth. I could not see the cat. But the thought in my
+mind was distinct: "He is making for the high grass at the end of the
+garden. I'll get there first!" I put my hand on the box border and ran
+swiftly along the path. When I reached the high grass, there was the cat
+gliding into the wavy tangle. I rushed forward and tried to seize him
+and take the bird from between his teeth. To my horror a huge beast, not
+the cat at all, sprang out from the grass, and his sinewy shoulder
+rubbed against me with palpitating strength! His ears stood up and
+quivered with anger. His eyes were hot. His nostrils were large and wet.
+His lips moved horribly. I knew it was a tiger, a real live tiger, and
+that I should be devoured--my little bird and I. I do not know what
+happened after that. The next important thing seldom happens in dreams.
+
+Some time earlier I had a dream which made a vivid impression upon me.
+My aunt was weeping because she could not find me. But I took an impish
+pleasure in the thought that she and others were searching for me, and
+making great noise which I felt through my feet. Suddenly the spirit of
+mischief gave way to uncertainty and fear. I felt cold. The air smelt
+like ice and salt. I tried to run; but the long grass tripped me, and I
+fell forward on my face. I lay very still, feeling with all my body.
+After a while my sensations seemed to be concentrated in my fingers, and
+I perceived that the grass blades were sharp as knives, and hurt my
+hands cruelly. I tried to get up cautiously, so as not to cut myself on
+the sharp grass. I put down a tentative foot, much as my kitten treads
+for the first time the primeval forest in the backyard. All at once I
+felt the stealthy patter of something creeping, creeping, creeping
+purposefully toward me. I do not know how at that time the idea was in
+my mind; I had no words for intention or purpose. Yet it was precisely
+the evil intent, and not the creeping animal that terrified me. I had
+no fear of living creatures. I loved my father's dogs, the frisky little
+calf, the gentle cows, the horses and mules that ate apples from my
+hand, and none of them had ever harmed me. I lay low, waiting in
+breathless terror for the creature to spring and bury its long claws in
+my flesh. I thought, "They will feel like turkey-claws." Something warm
+and wet touched my face. I shrieked, struck out frantically, and awoke.
+Something was still struggling in my arms. I held on with might and main
+until I was exhausted, then I loosed my hold. I found dear old Belle,
+the setter, shaking herself and looking at me reproachfully. She and I
+had gone to sleep together on the rug, and had naturally wandered to the
+dream-forest where dogs and little girls hunt wild game and have
+strange adventures. We encountered hosts of elfin foes, and it required
+all the dog tactics at Belle's command to acquit herself like the lady
+and huntress that she was. Belle had her dreams too. We used to lie
+under the trees and flowers in the old garden, and I used to laugh with
+delight when the magnolia leaves fell with little thuds, and Belle
+jumped up, thinking she had heard a partridge. She would pursue the
+leaf, point it, bring it back to me and lay it at my feet with a
+humorous wag of her tail as much as to say, "This is the kind of bird
+that waked me." I made a chain for her neck out of the lovely blue
+Paulownia flowers and covered her with great heart-shaped leaves.
+
+Dear old Belle, she has long been dreaming among the lotus-flowers and
+poppies of the dogs' paradise.
+
+Certain dreams have haunted me since my childhood. One which recurs
+often proceeds after this wise: A spirit seems to pass before my face. I
+feel an extreme heat like the blast from an engine. It is the embodiment
+of evil. I must have had it first after the day that I nearly got burnt.
+
+Another spirit which visits me often brings a sensation of cool
+dampness, such as one feels on a chill November night when the window is
+open. The spirit stops just beyond my reach, sways back and forth like a
+creature in grief. My blood is chilled, and seems to freeze in my veins.
+I try to move, but my body is still, and I cannot even cry out. After a
+while the spirit passes on, and I say to myself shudderingly, "That was
+Death. I wonder if he has taken her." The pronoun stands for my Teacher.
+
+In my dreams I have sensations, odours, tastes and ideas which I do not
+remember to have had in reality. Perhaps they are the glimpses which my
+mind catches through the veil of sleep of my earliest babyhood. I have
+heard "the trampling of many waters." Sometimes a wonderful light visits
+me in sleep. Such a flash and glory as it is! I gaze and gaze until it
+vanishes. I smell and taste much as in my waking hours; but the sense of
+touch plays a less important part. In sleep I almost never grope. No one
+guides me. Even in a crowded street I am self-sufficient, and I enjoy
+an independence quite foreign to my physical life. Now I seldom spell on
+my fingers, and it is still rarer for others to spell into my hand. My
+mind acts independent of my physical organs. I am delighted to be thus
+endowed, if only in sleep; for then my soul dons its winged sandals and
+joyfully joins the throng of happy beings who dwell beyond the reaches
+of bodily sense.
+
+The moral inconsistency of dreams is glaring. Mine grow less and less
+accordant with my proper principles. I am nightly hurled into an
+unethical medley of extremes. I must either defend another to the last
+drop of my blood or condemn him past all repenting. I commit murder,
+sleeping, to save the lives of others. I ascribe to those I love best
+acts and words which it mortifies me to remember, and I cast reproach
+after reproach upon them. It is fortunate for our peace of mind that
+most wicked dreams are soon forgotten. Death, sudden and awful, strange
+loves and hates remorselessly pursued, cunningly plotted revenge, are
+seldom more than dim haunting recollections in the morning, and during
+the day they are erased by the normal activities of the mind. Sometimes
+immediately on waking, I am so vexed at the memory of a dream-fracas, I
+wish I may dream no more. With this wish distinctly before me I drop off
+again into a new turmoil of dreams.
+
+Oh, dreams, what opprobrium I heap upon you--you, the most pointless
+things imaginable, saucy apes, brewers of odious contrasts, haunting
+birds of ill omen, mocking echoes, unseasonable reminders,
+oft-returning vexations, skeletons in my morris-chair, jesters in the
+tomb, death's-heads at the wedding feast, outlaws of the brain that
+every night defy the mind's police service, thieves of my Hesperidean
+apples, breakers of my domestic peace, murderers of sleep. "Oh, dreadful
+dreams that do fright my spirit from her propriety!" No wonder that
+Hamlet preferred the ills he knew rather than run the risk of one
+dream-vision.
+
+Yet remove the dream-world, and the loss is inconceivable. The magic
+spell which binds poetry together is broken. The splendour of art and
+the soaring might of imagination are lessened because no phantom of
+fadeless sunsets and flowers urges onward to a goal. Gone is the mute
+permission or connivance which emboldens the soul to mock the limits of
+time and space, forecast and gather in harvests of achievement for ages
+yet unborn. Blot out dreams, and the blind lose one of their chief
+comforts; for in the visions of sleep they behold their belief in the
+seeing mind and their expectation of light beyond the blank, narrow
+night justified. Nay, our conception of immortality is shaken. Faith,
+the motive-power of human life, flickers out. Before such vacancy and
+bareness the shocks of wrecked worlds were indeed welcome. In truth,
+dreams bring us the thought independently of us and in spite of us that
+the soul
+
+                                "may right
+          Her nature, shoot large sail on lengthening cord,
+          And rush exultant on the Infinite."
+
+
+
+
+DREAMS AND REALITY
+
+
+
+
+XIV
+
+DREAMS AND REALITY
+
+
+IT is astonishing to think how our real wide-awake world revolves around
+the shadowy unrealities of Dreamland. Despite all that we say about the
+inconsequence of dreams, we often reason by them. We stake our greatest
+hopes upon them. Nay, we build upon them the fabric of an ideal world. I
+can recall few fine, thoughtful poems, few noble works of art or any
+system of philosophy in which there is not evidence that dream-fantasies
+symbolize truths concealed by phenomena.
+
+The fact that in dreams confusion reigns, and illogical connections
+occur gives plausibility to the theory which Sir Arthur Mitchell and
+other scientific men hold, that our dream-thinking is uncontrolled and
+undirected by the will. The will--the inhibiting and guiding
+power--finds rest and refreshment in sleep, while the mind, like a
+barque without rudder or compass, drifts aimlessly upon an uncharted
+sea. But curiously enough, these fantasies and inter-twistings of
+thought are to be found in great imaginative poems like Spenser's "Faerie
+Queene." Lamb was impressed by the analogy between our dream-thinking
+and the work of the imagination. Speaking of the episode in the cave of
+Mammon, Lamb wrote:
+
+"It is not enough to say that the whole episode is a copy of the mind's
+conceptions in sleep; it is--in some sort, but what a copy! Let the most
+romantic of us that has been entertained all night with the spectacle of
+some wild and magnificent vision, re-combine it in the morning and try
+it by his waking judgment. That which appeared so shifting and yet so
+coherent, when it came under cool examination, shall appear so
+reasonless and so unlinked, that we are ashamed to have been so deluded,
+and to have taken, though but in sleep, a monster for a god. The
+transitions in this episode are every whit as violent as in the most
+extravagant dream, and yet the waking judgment ratifies them."
+
+Perhaps I feel more than others the analogy between the world of our
+waking life and the world of dreams because before I was taught, I lived
+in a sort of perpetual dream. The testimony of parents and friends who
+watched me day after day is the only means that I have of knowing the
+actuality of those early, obscure years of my childhood. The physical
+acts of going to bed and waking in the morning alone mark the transition
+from reality to Dreamland. As near as I can tell, asleep or awake I only
+felt with my body. I can recollect no process which I should now dignify
+with the term of thought. It is true that my bodily sensations were
+extremely acute; but beyond a crude connection with physical wants they
+are not associated or directed. They had little relation to each other,
+to me or the experience of others. Idea--that which gives identity and
+continuity to experience--came into my sleeping and waking existence at
+the same moment with the awakening of self-consciousness. Before that
+moment my mind was in a state of anarchy in which meaningless sensations
+rioted, and if thought existed, it was so vague and inconsequent, it
+cannot be made a part of discourse. Yet before my education began, I
+dreamed. I know that I must have dreamed because I recall no break in my
+tactual experiences. Things fell suddenly, heavily. I felt my clothing
+afire, or I fell into a tub of cold water. Once I smelt bananas, and the
+odour in my nostrils was so vivid that in the morning, before I was
+dressed, I went to the sideboard to look for the bananas. There were no
+bananas, and no odour of bananas anywhere! My life was in fact a dream
+throughout.
+
+The likeness between my waking state and the sleeping one is still
+marked. In both states I see, but not with my eyes. I hear, but not with
+my ears. I speak, and am spoken to, without the sound of a voice. I am
+moved to pleasure by visions of ineffable beauty which I have never
+beheld in the physical world. Once in a dream I held in my hand a pearl.
+The one I saw in my dreams must, therefore, have been a creation of my
+imagination. It was a smooth, exquisitely moulded crystal. As I gazed
+into its shimmering deeps, my soul was flooded with an ecstasy of
+tenderness, and I was filled with wonder as one who should for the
+first time look into the cool, sweet heart of a rose. My pearl was dew
+and fire, the velvety green of moss, the soft whiteness of lilies, and
+the distilled hues and sweetness of a thousand roses. It seemed to me,
+the soul of beauty was dissolved in its crystal bosom. This beauteous
+vision strengthens my conviction that the world which the mind builds up
+out of countless subtle experiences and suggestions is fairer than the
+world of the senses. The splendour of the sunset my friends gaze at
+across the purpling hills is wonderful. But the sunset of the inner
+vision brings purer delight because it is the worshipful blending of all
+the beauty that we have known and desired.
+
+I believe that I am more fortunate in my dreams than most people; for
+as I think back over my dreams, the pleasant ones seem to predominate,
+although we naturally recall most vividly and tell most eagerly the
+grotesque and fantastic adventures in Slumberland. I have friends,
+however, whose dreams are always troubled and disturbed. They wake
+fatigued and bruised, and they tell me that they would give a kingdom
+for one dreamless night. There is one friend who declares that she has
+never had a felicitous dream in her life. The grind and worry of the day
+invade the sweet domain of sleep and weary her with incessant,
+profitless effort. I feel very sorry for this friend, and perhaps it is
+hardly fair to insist upon the pleasure of dreaming in the presence of
+one whose dream-experience is so unhappy. Still, it is true that my
+dreams have uses as many and sweet as those of adversity. All my
+yearning for the strange, the weird, the ghostlike is gratified in
+dreams. They carry me out of the accustomed and commonplace. In a flash,
+in the winking of an eye they snatch the burden from my shoulder, the
+trivial task from my hand and the pain and disappointment from my heart,
+and I behold the lovely face of my dream. It dances round me with merry
+measure and darts hither and thither in happy abandon. Sudden, sweet
+fancies spring forth from every nook and corner, and delightful
+surprises meet me at every turn. A happy dream is more precious than
+gold and rubies.
+
+I like to think that in dreams we catch glimpses of a life larger than
+our own. We see it as a little child, or as a savage who visits a
+civilized nation. Thoughts are imparted to us far above our ordinary
+thinking. Feelings nobler and wiser than any we have known thrill us
+between heart-beats. For one fleeting night a princelier nature captures
+us, and we become as great as our aspirations. I daresay we return to
+the little world of our daily activities with as distorted a half-memory
+of what we have seen as that of the African who visited England, and
+afterwards said he had been in a huge hill which carried him over great
+waters. The comprehensiveness of our thought, whether we are asleep or
+awake, no doubt depends largely upon our idiosyncrasies, constitution,
+habits, and mental capacity. But whatever may be the nature of our
+dreams, the mental processes that characterize them are analogous to
+those which go on when the mind is not held to attention by the will.
+
+
+
+
+A WAKING DREAM
+
+
+
+
+XV
+
+A WAKING DREAM
+
+
+I HAVE sat for hours in a sort of reverie, letting my mind have its way
+without inhibition and direction, and idly noted down the incessant beat
+of thought upon thought, image upon image. I have observed that my
+thoughts make all kinds of connections, wind in and out, trace
+concentric circles, and break up in eddies of fantasy, just as in
+dreams. One day I had a literary frolic with a certain set of thoughts
+which dropped in for an afternoon call. I wrote for three or four hours
+as they arrived, and the resulting record is much like a dream. I found
+that the most disconnected, dissimilar thoughts came in arm-in-arm--I
+dreamed a wide-awake dream. The difference is that in waking dreams I
+can look back upon the endless succession of thoughts, while in the
+dreams of sleep I can recall but few ideas and images. I catch broken
+threads from the warp and woof of a pattern I cannot see, or glowing
+leaves which have floated on a slumber-wind from a tree that I cannot
+identify. In this reverie I held the key to the company of ideas. I give
+my record of them to show what analogies exist between thoughts when
+they are not directed and the behaviour of real dream-thinking.
+
+I had an essay to write. I wanted my mind fresh and obedient, and all
+its handmaidens ready to hold up my hands in the task. I intended to
+discourse learnedly upon my educational experiences, and I was unusually
+anxious to do my best. I had a working plan in my head for the essay,
+which was to be grave, wise, and abounding in ideas. Moreover, it was to
+have an academic flavour suggestive of sheepskin, and the reader was to
+be duly impressed with the austere dignity of cap and gown. I shut
+myself up in the study, resolved to beat out on the keys of my
+typewriter this immortal chapter of my life-history. Alexander was no
+more confident of conquering Asia with the splendid army which his
+father Philip had disciplined than I was of finding my mental house in
+order and my thoughts obedient. My mind had had a long vacation, and I
+was now coming back to it in an hour that it looked not for me. My
+situation was similar to that of the master who went into a far country
+and expected on his home coming to find everything as he left it. But
+returning he found his servants giving a party. Confusion was rampant.
+There was fiddling and dancing and the babble of many tongues, so that
+the voice of the master could not be heard. Though he shouted and beat
+upon the gate, it remained closed.
+
+So it was with me. I sounded the trumpet loud and long; but the vassals
+of thought would not rally to my standard. Each had his arm round the
+waist of a fair partner, and I know not what wild tunes "put life and
+mettle into their heels." There was nothing to do. I looked about
+helplessly upon my great retinue, and realized that it is not the
+possession of a thing but the ability to use it which is of value. I
+settled back in my chair to watch the pageant. It was rather pleasant
+sitting there, "idle as a painted ship upon a painted ocean," watching
+my own thoughts at play. It was like thinking fine things to say without
+taking the trouble to write them. I felt like Alice in Wonderland when
+she ran at full speed with the red queen and never passed anything or
+got anywhere.
+
+The merry frolic went on madly. The dancers were all manner of thoughts.
+There were sad thoughts and happy thoughts, thoughts suited to every
+clime and weather, thoughts bearing the mark of every age and nation,
+silly thoughts and wise thoughts, thoughts of people, of things, and of
+nothing, good thoughts, impish thoughts, and large, gracious thoughts.
+There they went swinging hand-in-hand in corkscrew fashion. An antic
+jester in green and gold led the dance. The guests followed no order or
+precedent. No two thoughts were related to each other even by the
+fortieth cousinship. There was not so much as an international alliance
+between them. Each thought behaved like a newly created poet.
+
+          "His mouth he could not ope,
+           But there flew out a trope."
+
+Magical lyrics--oh, if I only had written them down! Pell-mell they came
+down the sequestered avenues of my mind, this merry throng. With
+bacchanal song and shout they came, and eye hath not since beheld
+confusion worse confounded.
+
+Shut your eyes, and see them come--the knights and ladies of my revel.
+Plumed and turbaned they come, clad in mail and silken broideries,
+gentle maids in Quaker gray, gay princes in scarlet cloaks, coquettes
+with roses in their hair, monks in cowls that might have covered the
+tall Minster Tower, demure little girls hugging paper dolls, and
+rollicking school-boys with ruddy morning faces, an absent-minded
+professor carrying his shoes under his arms and looking wise, followed
+by cronies, fairies, goblins, and all the troops just loosed from Noah's
+storm-tossed ark. They walked, they strutted, they soared, they swam,
+and some came in through fire. One sprite climbed up to the moon on a
+ladder made of leaves and frozen dew-drops. A peacock with a great
+hooked bill flew in and out among the branches of a pomegranate-tree
+pecking the rosy fruit. He screamed so loud that Apollo turned in his
+chariot of flame and from his burnished bow shot golden arrows at him.
+This did not disturb the peacock in the least; for he spread his
+gem-like wings and flourished his wonderful, fire-tipped tail in the
+very face of the sun-god! Then came Venus--an exact copy of my own
+plaster cast--serene, calm-eyed, dancing "high and disposedly" like
+Queen Elizabeth, surrounded by a troop of lovely Cupids mounted on
+rose-tinted clouds, blown hither and thither by sweet winds, while all
+around danced flowers and streams and queer little Japanese cherry-trees
+in pots! They were followed by jovial Pan with green hair and jewelled
+sandals, and by his side--I could scarcely believe my eyes!--walked a
+modest nun counting her beads. At a little distance were seen three
+dancers arm-in-arm, a lean, starved platitude, a rosy, dimpled joke, and
+a steel-ribbed sermon on predestination. Close upon them came a whole
+string of Nights with wind-blown hair and Days with faggots on their
+backs. All at once I saw the ample figure of Life rise above the
+whirling mass holding a naked child in one hand and in the other a
+gleaming sword. A bear crouched at her feet, and all about her swirled
+and glowed a multitudinous host of tiny atoms which sang all together,
+"We are the will of God." Atom wedded atom, and chemical married
+chemical, and the cosmic dance went on in changing, changeless measure,
+until my head sang like a buzz-saw.
+
+Just as I was thinking I would leave this scene of phantoms and take a
+stroll in the quiet groves of Slumber I noticed a commotion near one of
+the entrances to my enchanted palace. It was evident from the whispering
+and buzzing that went round that more celebrities had arrived. The first
+personage I saw was Homer, blind no more, leading by a golden chain the
+white-beaked ships of the Achaians bobbing their heads and squawking
+like so many white swans. Plato and Mother Goose with the numerous
+children of the shoe came next. Simple Simon, Jill, and Jack who had had
+his head mended, and the cat that fell into the cream--all these danced
+in a giddy reel, while Plato solemnly discoursed on the laws of
+Topsyturvy Land. Then followed grim-visaged Calvin and "violet-crowned,
+sweet-smiling Sappho" who danced a Schottische. Aristophanes and Moliere
+joined for a measure, both talking at once, Moliere in Greek and
+Aristophanes in German. I thought this odd, because it occurred to me
+that German was a dead language before Aristophanes was born.
+Bright-eyed Shelley brought in a fluttering lark which burst into the
+song of Chaucer's chanticleer. Henry Esmond gave his hand in a stately
+minuet to Diana of the Crossways. He evidently did not understand her
+nineteenth century wit; for he did not laugh. Perhaps he had lost his
+taste for clever women. Anon Dante and Swedenborg came together
+conversing earnestly about things remote and mystical. Swedenborg said
+it was very warm. Dante replied that it might rain in the night.
+
+Suddenly there was a great clamour, and I found that "The Battle of the
+Books" had begun raging anew. Two figures entered in lively dispute. One
+was dressed in plain homespun and the other wore a scholar's gown over a
+suit of motley. I gathered from their conversation that they were Cotton
+Mather and William Shakspere. Mather insisted that the witches in
+"Macbeth" should be caught and hanged. Shakspere replied that the
+witches had already suffered enough at the hands of commentators. They
+were pushed aside by the twelve knights of the Round Table, who marched
+in bearing on a salver the goose that laid golden eggs. "The Pope's
+Mule" and "The Golden Bull" had a combat of history and fiction such as
+I had read of in books, but never before witnessed. These little animals
+were put to rout by a huge elephant which lumbered in with Rudyard
+Kipling riding high on its trunk. The elephant changed suddenly to "a
+rakish craft." (I do not know what a rakish craft is; but this was very
+rakish and very crafty.) It must have been abandoned long ago by wild
+pirates of the southern seas; for clinging to the rigging, and jovially
+cheering as the ship went down, I made out a man with blazing eyes, clad
+in a velveteen jacket. As the ship disappeared from sight, Falstaff
+rushed to the rescue of the lonely navigator--and stole his purse! But
+Miranda persuaded him to give it back. Stevenson said, "Who steals my
+purse steals trash." Falstaff laughed and called this a good joke, as
+good as any he had heard in his day.
+
+This was the signal for a rushing swarm of quotations. They surged to
+and fro, an inchoate throng of half finished phrases, mutilated
+sentences, parodied sentiments, and brilliant metaphors. I could not
+distinguish any phrases or ideas of my own making. I saw a poor, ragged,
+shrunken sentence that might have been mine own catch the wings of a
+fair idea with the light of genius shining like a halo about its head.
+
+Ever and anon the dancers changed partners without invitation or
+permission. Thoughts fell in love at sight, married in a measure, and
+joined hands without previous courtship. An incongruity is the wedding
+of two thoughts which have had no reasonable courtship, and marriages
+without wooing are apt to lead to domestic discord, even to the breaking
+up of an ancient, time-honoured family. Among the wedded couples were
+certain similes hitherto inviolable in their bachelorhood and
+spinsterhood, and held in great respect. Their extraordinary proceedings
+nearly broke up the dance. But the fatuity of their union was evident to
+them, and they parted. Other similes seemed to have the habit of living
+in discord. They had been many times married and divorced. They belonged
+to the notorious society of Mixed Metaphors.
+
+A company of phantoms floated in and out wearing tantalizing garments
+of oblivion. They seemed about to dance, then vanished. They reappeared
+half a dozen times, but never unveiled their faces. The imp Curiosity
+pulled Memory by the sleeve and said, "Why do they run away? 'Tis
+strange knavery!" Out ran Memory to capture them. After a great deal of
+racing and puffing and collision it apprehended some of the fugitives
+and brought them in. But when it tore off their masks, lo! some were
+disappointingly commonplace, and others were gipsy quotations trying to
+conceal the punctuation marks that belonged to them. Memory was much
+chagrined to have had such a hard chase only to catch this sorry lot of
+graceless rogues.
+
+Into the rabble strode four stately giants who called themselves
+History, Philosophy, Law, and Medicine. They seemed too solemn and
+imposing to join in a masque. But even as I gazed at these formidable
+guests, they all split into fragments which went whirling, dancing in
+divisions, subdivisions, re-subdivisions of scientific nonsense! History
+split into philology, ethnology, anthropology, and mythology, and these
+again split finer than the splitting of hairs. Each speciality hugged
+its bit of knowledge and waltzed it round and round. The rest of the
+company began to nod, and I felt drowsy myself. To put an end to the
+solemn gyrations, a troop of fairies mercifully waved poppies over us
+all, the masque faded, my head fell, and I started. Sleep had wakened
+me. At my elbow I found my old friend Bottom.
+
+"Bottom," I said, "I have had a dream past the wit of man to say what
+dream it was. Methought I was--there is no man can tell what. The eye of
+man hath not heard, the ear of man hath not seen, his hand is not able
+to taste, his tongue to conceive, nor his heart to report what my dream
+was."
+
+
+
+
+A CHANT OF DARKNESS
+
+
+
+
+A CHANT OF DARKNESS
+
+          "_My wings are folded o'er mine ears,
+            My wings are crossed o'er mine eyes,
+            Yet through their silver shade appears,
+            And through their lulling plumes arise,
+            A Shape, a throng of sounds._"
+
+                     _Shelley's "Prometheus Unbound."_
+
+
+          I DARE not ask why we are reft of light,
+          Banished to our solitary isles amid the unmeasured seas,
+          Or how our sight was nurtured to glorious vision,
+          To fade and vanish and leave us in the dark alone.
+          The secret of God is upon our tabernacle;
+          Into His mystery I dare not pry. Only this I know:
+          With Him is strength, with Him is wisdom,
+          And His wisdom hath set darkness in our paths.
+         _Out of the uncharted, unthinkable dark we came,
+          And in a little time we shall return again
+          Into the vast, unanswering dark._
+
+          O Dark! thou awful, sweet, and holy Dark!
+          In thy solemn spaces, beyond the human eye,
+          God fashioned His universe; laid the foundations of the earth,
+          Laid the measure thereof, and stretched the line upon it;
+          Shut up the sea with doors, and made the glory
+          Of the clouds a covering for it;
+          Commanded His morning, and, behold! chaos fled
+          Before the uplifted face of the sun;
+          Divided a water-course for the overflowing of waters;
+          Sent rain upon the earth--
+          Upon the wilderness wherein there was no man,
+          Upon the desert where grew no tender herb,
+          And, lo! there was greenness upon the plains,
+          And the hills were clothed with beauty!
+         _Out of the uncharted, unthinkable dark we came,
+          And in a little time we shall return again
+          Into the vast, unanswering dark._
+
+          O Dark! thou secret and inscrutable Dark!
+          In thy silent depths, the springs whereof man hath not fathomed,
+          God wrought the soul of man.
+          O Dark! compassionate, all-knowing Dark!
+          Tenderly, as shadows to the evening, comes thy message to man.
+          Softly thou layest thy hand on his tired eyelids,
+          And his soul, weary and homesick, returns
+          Unto thy soothing embrace.
+         _Out of the uncharted, unthinkable dark we came,
+          And in a little time we shall return again
+          Into the vast, unanswering dark._
+
+          O Dark! wise, vital, thought-quickening Dark!
+          In thy mystery thou hidest the light
+          That is the soul's life.
+          Upon thy solitary shores I walk unafraid;
+          I dread no evil; though I walk in the valley of the shadow,
+          I shall not know the ecstasy of fear
+          When gentle Death leads me through life's open door,
+          When the bands of night are sundered,
+          And the day outpours its light.
+         _Out of the uncharted, unthinkable dark we came,
+          And in a little time we shall return again
+          Into the vast, unanswering dark._
+
+          The timid soul, fear-driven, shuns the dark;
+          But upon the cheeks of him who must abide in shadow
+          Breathes the wind of rushing angel-wings,
+          And round him falls a light from unseen fires.
+          Magical beams glow athwart the darkness;
+          Paths of beauty wind through his black world
+          To another world of light,
+          Where no veil of sense shuts him out from Paradise.
+          _Out of the uncharted, unthinkable dark we came,
+          And in a little time we shall return again
+          Into the vast, unanswering dark._
+
+          O Dark! thou blessed, quiet Dark!
+          To the lone exile who must dwell with thee
+          Thou art benign and friendly;
+          From the harsh world thou dost shut him in;
+          To him thou whisperest the secrets of the wondrous night;
+          Upon him thou bestowest regions wide and boundless as his spirit;
+          Thou givest a glory to all humble things;
+          With thy hovering pinions thou coverest all unlovely objects;
+          Under thy brooding wings there is peace.
+          _Out of the uncharted, unthinkable dark we came,
+          And in a little time we shall return again
+          Into the vast, unanswering dark._
+
+
+II
+
+          Once in regions void of light I wandered;
+          In blank darkness I stumbled,
+          And fear led me by the hand;
+          My feet pressed earthward,
+          Afraid of pitfalls.
+          By many shapeless terrors of the night affrighted,
+          To the wakeful day
+          I held out beseeching arms.
+
+          Then came Love, bearing in her hand
+          The torch that is the light unto my feet,
+          And softly spoke Love: "Hast thou
+          Entered into the treasures of darkness?
+          Hast thou entered into the treasures of the night?
+          Search out thy blindness. It holdeth
+          Riches past computing."
+
+          The words of Love set my spirit aflame.
+          My eager fingers searched out the mysteries,
+          The splendours, the inmost sacredness, of things,
+          And in the vacancies discerned
+          With spiritual sense the fullness of life;
+          And the gates of Day stood wide.
+
+          I am shaken with gladness;
+          My limbs tremble with joy;
+          My heart and the earth
+          Tremble with happiness;
+          The ecstasy of life
+          Is abroad in the world.
+
+          Knowledge hath uncurtained heaven;
+          On the uttermost shores of darkness there is light;
+          Midnight hath sent forth a beam!
+          The blind that stumbled in darkness without light
+          Behold a new day!
+          In the obscurity gleams the star of Thought;
+          Imagination hath a luminous eye,
+          And the mind hath a glorious vision.
+
+
+III
+
+          "The man is blind. What is life to him?
+          A closed book held up against a sightless face.
+          Would that he could see
+          Yon beauteous star, and know
+          For one transcendent moment
+          The palpitating joy of sight!"
+
+          All sight is of the soul.
+          Behold it in the upward flight
+          Of the unfettered spirit! Hast thou seen
+          Thought bloom in the blind child's face?
+          Hast thou seen his mind grow,
+          Like the running dawn, to grasp
+          The vision of the Master?
+          It was the miracle of inward sight.
+
+          In the realms of wonderment where I dwell
+          I explore life with my hands;
+          I recognize, and am happy;
+          My fingers are ever athirst for the earth,
+          And drink up its wonders with delight,
+          Draw out earth's dear delights;
+          My feet are charged with the murmur,
+          The throb, of all things that grow.
+
+          This is touch, this quivering,
+          This flame, this ether,
+          This glad rush of blood,
+          This daylight in my heart,
+          This glow of sympathy in my palms!
+          Thou blind, loving, all-prying touch,
+          Thou openest the book of life to me.
+
+          The noiseless little noises of the earth
+          Come with softest rustle;
+          The shy, sweet feet of life;
+          The silky mutter of moth-wings
+          Against my restraining palm;
+          The strident beat of insect-wings,
+          The silvery trickle of water;
+          Little breezes busy in the summer grass;
+          The music of crisp, whisking, scurrying leaves,
+          The swirling, wind-swept, frost-tinted leaves;
+          The crystal splash of summer rain,
+          Saturate with the odours of the sod.
+
+          With alert fingers I listen
+          To the showers of sound
+          That the wind shakes from the forest.
+          I bathe in the liquid shade
+          Under the pines, where the air hangs cool
+          After the shower is done.
+          My saucy little friend the squirrel
+          Flips my shoulder with his tail,
+          Leaps from leafy billow to leafy billow,
+          Returns to eat his breakfast from my hand.
+          Between us there is glad sympathy;
+          He gambols; my pulses dance;
+          I am exultingly full of the joy of life!
+
+          Have not my fingers split the sand
+          On the sun-flooded beach?
+          Hath not my naked body felt the water sing
+          When the sea hath enveloped it
+          With rippling music?
+          Have I not felt
+          The lilt of waves beneath my boat,
+          The flap of sail,
+          The strain of mast,
+          The wild rush
+          Of the lightning-charged winds?
+          Have I not smelt the swift, keen flight
+          Of winged odours before the tempest?
+          Here is joy awake, aglow;
+          Here is the tumult of the heart.
+
+          My hands evoke sight and sound out of feeling,
+          Intershifting the senses endlessly;
+          Linking motion with sight, odour with sound
+          They give colour to the honeyed breeze,
+          The measure and passion of a symphony
+          To the beat and quiver of unseen wings.
+          In the secrets of earth and sun and air
+          My fingers are wise;
+          They snatch light out of darkness,
+          They thrill to harmonies breathed in silence.
+
+          I walked in the stillness of the night,
+          And my soul uttered her gladness.
+          O Night, still, odorous Night, I love thee!
+          O wide, spacious Night, I love thee!
+          O steadfast, glorious Night!
+          I touch thee with my hands;
+          I lean against thy strength;
+          I am comforted.
+
+          O fathomless, soothing Night!
+          Thou art a balm to my restless spirit,
+          I nestle gratefully in thy bosom,
+          Dark, gracious mother!
+          Like a dove, I rest in thy bosom.
+          _Out of the uncharted, unthinkable dark we came,
+          And in a little time we shall return again
+          Into the vast, unanswering dark._
+
+
+
+
+                  PRINTED BY
+          WILLIAM BRENDON AND SON, LTD.
+                   PLYMOUTH
+
+
+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+
+
+Transcriber's Note:
+
+Page 223, "similies" changed to "similes" (Other similes seemed)
+
+
+
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