Perhaps without the stimulus of the
organ he could not have fashioned that song which, as Macaulay says in his
grandiloquent way, "would not have misbecome the lips of those ethereal
beings whom he saw with that inner eye, which no calamity could darken,
flinging down on the jasper pavements their crowns of amaranth and gold."
It is probable that in a material sense blindness is the most terrible
affliction that can befall us; but I am here speaking only of its spiritual
effects, and in this respect the deprivation of hearing and speech seems to
involve a more forlorn state than the deprivation of sight. The one
affliction means spiritual loneliness: the other deepens the spiritual
intimacies of life. It was a man who had gone blind late in life who said:
"I am thankful it is my sight which has gone rather than my hearing. The
one has shut me off from the sun: the other would have shut me off from
life."
ON TAXING VANITY
That quaint idea of Sir Edward Clarke's that, as a revenue expedient in
time of war, we should impose a tax on those who have names as well as
numbers on their garden gates has a principle in it which is capable of
wide extension.
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