o 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