On Blindness
Many have been the appeals to our sympathy with the affliction of the loss of sight, but neither has, perhaps, exceeded in pathos the following from an address delivered by Sir John Coleridge, at the West of England Institution for the Blind:
“Conceive to yourselves, for a moment, what is the ordinary entertainment and conversation that passes around any one of your family tables; how many things we talk of as matters of course, as to the understanding and as to the bare conception of which sight is absolutely necessary. Consider again, what an affliction the loss of sight must be, and that when we talk of the golden sun, the bright stars, the beautiful flowers, the blush of spring, the glow of summer, and the ripening fruit of autumn, we are talking of things of which we do not convey to the minds of these poor creatures who are born blind anything like an adequate conception. There was once a great man, as we all know, in this country, a poet—and nearly the greatest poet that England has ever had to boast of—who was blind; and there is a passage in his works which is so true and touching that it exactly describes that which I have endeavoured, in feeble language, to paint. Milton says:
“‘Thus with the year
Seasons return; but not to me returns
Day, or the sweet approach of ev’n, or morn,
Or sight of vernal bloom, or summer’s rose,
Or flocks, or herds, or human face divine;
But cloud instead, and ever during dark
Surrounds me, from the cheerful ways of men
Cut off, and for the book of knowledge fair
Presented with a universal blank
Of Nature’s works, to me expunged and rased,
And wisdom at one entrance quite shut out.
So much the rather then, celestial light,
Shine inward, and the mind through all her powers
Irradiate; there plant eyes; all mist from thence
Purge and disperse; that I may see and tell
Of things invisible to mortal sight.’
“The great poet when intent upon his work sought for celestial light to accomplish it. And this brings me to that part of the labours of our institution upon which I dwell the most, and which, after all, is the greatest compensation we can afford to the inmates for the affliction they suffer; and that is, the means we provide for them to read the blessed Word of God, which they can read by day as well as by night, for light in their case is not an essential.”