delicious fruit, a genial warmth, and even
harmonious sounds please us. It is a pleasure afforded
to the wind. A painful sight gives pain which
has no analogy to the annoyance caused by a
disgusting stench, a nauseous drug, a severe
burn, or a discordant noise, such as the sharpening
of a saw, which sets the hearer's teeth on
edge, and makes cold water run down his back.
A sight may be so painful and agonising as to
render the seer motionless and deadly cold; to
cause vomiting, congestion of the brain,
apoplexy, convulsions, and even death. But it
exerts that powerful influence solely through the
effect of mental emotion. It is the soul only
which suffers first, although, its suffering acts
afterwards upon the body.

Light further resembles thought, in not
acting instantaneously. We say "as quick as
thought;" and we may say, if we please, "as
quick as light," with equal truth. But light
takes time to travel from one point to another,
however inappreciable to us that infinitesimal
period of time may be. Thought, likewise,
takes time to evolve itself, whether our intention
in thinking be to recal the past, to imagine
a fiction, or to form a judgment. To collect our
thoughts, is a work of time. Intricate reasonings,
logical conclusions, poems, romances,
pictorial and other artistic conceptions, require
time for their elaboration, and are not flashed off
with the suddenness of a miracle. So also it
is with the transmission of light.

The sense of sight, which we owe to the
existence of light, endows us even, through its
agency, with an approach to the gift of ubiquity.
By sight, we dart our own personality to various
different points in rapid succession; we become
aware of distant objects and events; and yet we
remain, all the while, wherever we happen to be
in bodily presence. We are witnesses to, and
are immediately present at, all that passes within
the range of our ken.

Consider well the enormous difference between
the man born blind and the man whom
Providence has blessed with sight. The blind man's
is an isolated intelligence. His knowledge of
what exists, and of what is going on, around
him, is exceedingly limited confined to what
he can touch, and feel, and perceive with his
grosser bodily senses. Sound even can give him
information of events taking place only throughout
a quite restricted extent of space. Of facts
and phenomena which have their seat beyond the
limits of the terrestrial sphere, he can have no
cognisance—scarcely a conception. The
atmosphere is very partially open to his observation.
The wind he can feel, and the thunder he
can hear; rain will wet him, and snow will chill
him: but what notion can he form of the lightning's
flash; of clouds, and their varieties; of
fog and rime; of sunsets, auroræ boreales, and
shooting stars? He is apprised of the sun's
existence, exactly as he is of that of his kitchen
fire; namely, by the warmth which sunshine
impresses upon his skin. Of the sun riding in
the heavens, of the solar system of planets and
satellites, of the starry firmament, however well
described and explained to him, he can merely
form a vague and incomplete idea. Nay, he
would be quite excusable in entertaining doubts
as to the reality of the wonders described to
him. The blind man has not even circumstantial
evidence to prove, the truth of much to which
he is required to give credence. Tor seeing only
is, if not thoroughly believing, at least complete
perception and understanding.

A blind man, as far as observation is
concerned, is, mentally, a mathematical point. He
has no observant breadth, nor length, nor thickness.
However bright his intellect, it must
remain a mere speck, concentrated in one focus,
without power of radiating outwards, or of
receiving radiation from without. So that sight
is the most grasping and comprehensive of all
our senses, as well as the most spiritual and
intellectual in its functions. Through it we
learn what motion really is; space becomes to us
a fact, instead of a puzzle; and, by it, we are
enabled to admit, though we cannot quite hold
it in our mental clutch, the meaning of the
word Infinity. Within its own range, it makes
us omnipresent.

Standing on an eminence, with one of Nature's
grand panoramas before us, sight empowers us
to assimilate the whole, as if it were a part of
our own individuality. We drink in the
landscape with our eyes. We embrace every detail.
We are instantly present at every locality
included within our vast horizon. We follow the
windings of the stream. We leap, with the
cascade, from rock to rock. We track the
changes in the forest, verifying the altered
features brought about by increase of altitude.
We mark where oak and beech give way to fir;
where stunted shrubs can climb no further; and
where naked storm-rent peaks tower above all.

There are mountains on whose inaccessible
summit human foot has never yet trod.
Notwithstanding which, we, who enjoy the gift of
sight, know them, and what is happening about
them, as if they lay in our daily track. We
are as sure of the nature of their slippery
icefields, their perpendicular precipices, and their
treacherous snows, as if we had tested each by
handling. Not a mist, however light, can curl
round their apex, or repose on their side, without
our being informed of it by an unfailing telegraph
which reaches where no other telegraph can
climb.

But our consciousness is able to throw itself
to distances far beyond the mountain-tops. We
know whether the earth is wrapped around by a
mantle of clouds in the heights of the
atmosphere, or whether no condensed vapour is held
suspended in the whole azure abyss which lies
between us and the moon. Beyond the moon,
we travel onwards; and, with the chronometer
which we hold in our hand, we measure
movements whose scene of action is removed by an
interval which would take us months and years
to traverse in person, even if we pursued our
it cannon-ball speed, incessantly. As
certain as we are that the hands of the clock on
our chimney piece complete their round, one