After the heavenly tune, which none can hear Soul of Alvar! Hear our soft suit, and heed my milder spell ; So may the gates of Paradise, unbarr'd, Cease thy swift toils! Since haply thou art one Who in broad circle, lovelier than the rainbow, 174.-DEAFNESS. J. KITTO. [ONE of the most interesting auto-biographical books, perhaps, that ever was published, whether considered in a physiological or moral point of view, appeared in the series of Knight's Weekly Volumes. It is entitled "The Lost Senses-Deafness," and is written by Dr. Kitto, the editor of the "Pictorial Bible." The introductory chapter of this little book, which we subjoin, is most curious in itself, and renders any further explanation unnecessary.] Any one who has spent a considerable time under peculiar, or at least undescribed, circumstances, must have been very unobservant if he has nothing to relate in which the public would be interested. It may be, indeed, that such a person lies under the same obligation to the public of describing his own condition, as a traveller is under to render his report respecting the unexplored countries which he has traversed in his pilgrimage. It is under this impression that I now write. I am unwilling to quit this world without leaving behind me some record of a condition of which no sufferer has yet rendered an account. The condition itself is not entirely new; and that it has not been hitherto described, may be owing to the fact that a morning of life, subject to such crushing calamity, has seldom, if ever, been followed by a day of such self-culture,-which is the only culture possible,-and of such active exertion, as seems indispen sably necessary to prevent the faculties from rusting, under the absence of the diverse influences by which they are, in ordinary circumstances, brought into working condition for the useful labor at which all men should aim, and for the struggles necessary to self-advancement in a country and in a time like this. My case is this. It has pleased Providence that three-fourths of a life, now at its meridian, should be passed in the most intense DEAFNESS to which any living creature can be subjected, and which could not be more entire had the organs, conducive to the sense of hearing, been altogether wanting. It is the consequences resulting from this position that form the theme which I have now placed before me. For one who is deaf, my life has been studious; and for one who has been both deaf and studious, -or indeed for any one,-my life has not been uneventful. I know not, however, that I have any right to obtrude the events or studies of my life upon the public notice; and it is not my intention to refer to them further than may be necessary to bring out the points and peculiarities of the deaf condition. From the multifarious matters arising from the activities of a life which once seemed doomed to inertion, I shall select those only which arise from, which illustrate, or which are in any remarkable way connected with, my deafness. It is needful to explain this, lest, in sketching the natural history of my deafness, I should be supposed to offer a biography of myself. I became deaf on my father's birthday, early in the year 1817, when I had lately completed the twelfth year of my age. The commencement of this condition is too clearly connected with my circumstances in life to allow me to abstain from troubling the reader with some particulars which I should have been otherwise willing to withhold. My father, at the expiration of his apprenticeship, was enabled, by the support of his elder brother, an engineer, well known in the West of England, to commence life as a master-builder, with advantageous connections and the most favorable prospects. But both the brothers seem to have belonged to that class of men whom prosperity ruins : for after some years they became neglectful of their business, and were eventually reduced to great distress. At the time I have specified, my father had become a jobbing mason, of precarious employment, and in such circumstances that it had for some time been necessary that I should lend my small assistance to his labors. This early demand upon my services, joined to much previous inability or reluctance to stand the cost of my schooling, and to frequent headache, which kept me much from school even when in nominal attendance, made my education very backward. I could read well, but was an indifferent writer and worse cipherer, when the day arrived which was to alter so materially my condition and hopes in life. The circumstances of that day—the last of twelve years of hearing, and the first of twenty-eight years of deafness—have left a more distinct impression upon my mind than those of any previous, or almost any subsequent day of my life. It was a day to be remembered. The last day on which any customary labor ceases, the last day on which any customary privilege is enjoyed, the last day on which we do the things we have done daily, are always marked days in the calendar of life; how much, therefore, must the mind not linger in the memories of a day which was the last of many blessed things, and in which one stroke of action and suffering, one moment of time, wrought a greater change of condition, than any sudden loss of wealth or honors ever made in the state of man. Wealth may be recovered and new honors won, or happiness may be secured without them; but there is no recovery, no adequate compensation, for such a loss as was on that day sustained. The wealth of sweet and pleasurable sounds with which the Almighty has filled the world,— of sounds, modulated by affection, sympathy, and earnestness,— can be appreciated only by one who has so long been thus poor indeed in the want of them, and who for so many weary years has sat in utter silence amid the busy hum of populous cities, the music of the woods and mountains, and more than all, of the voices sweeter than music which are in the winter season heard around the domestic hearth. On the day in question my father and another man, attended by myself, were engaged in new slating the roof of a house, the ladder ascending to which was fixed in a small court paved with flag-stones. The access to this court from the street was by a paved passage, through which ran a gutter, whereby waste water was conducted from the yard into the street. Three things occupied my mind that day. One was that the town-crier, who occupied part of the house in which we lived, had been the previous evening prevailed upon to intrust me with a book, for which I had long been worrying him, and with the contents of which I was most eager to become acquainted. I think it was 'Kirby's Wonderful Magazine;" and I now dwell the rather upon this circumstance, as, with other facts of the same kind, it helps to satisfy me that I was already a most voracious reader, and that the calamity which befell me did not create in me the literary appetite, but only threw me more entirely upon the resources which it offered. The other circumstance was, that my grandmother had finished, all but the buttons, a new smock-frock, which I had hoped to have assumed that very day, but which was faithfully promised for the morrow. As this was the first time that I should have worn that article of attire, the event was contemplated with something of that interest and solicitude with which the assumption of the toga virilis may be supposed to have been contemplated by the Roman youth. The last circumstance, and the one perhaps which had some effect upon what ensued, was this. In one of the apartments of the house in which we were at work, a young sailor, of whom I had some knowledge, had died after a lingering illness, which had been attended with circumstances which the doctors could not well understand. It was, therefore, concluded that the body should be opened to ascertain the cause of death. I knew this was to be done, but not the time appointed for the operation. But on passing from the street into the yard, with a load of slates which I was to take to the house-top, my attention was drawn to a stream of blood, or rather, I suppose, bloody water, flowing through the gutter by which the passage was traversed. The idea that this was the blood of the dead youth, whom I had sc lately seen alive, and that the doctors were then at work cutting him up and groping at his inside, made me shudder, and gave what I should now call a shock to my nerves, although I was very innocent of all knowledge about nerves at that time. I cannot but think it was owing to this that I lost much of the presence of mind and collectedness so important to me at that moment; for when I had ascended to the top of the ladder, and was in the critical act of stepping from it on to the roof, I lost my footing, and fell backward, from a height of about thirty-five feet, into the paved court below. Of what followed I know nothing; and as this is the record of my own sensations, I can here report nothing but that which I myself know. For one moment, indeed, I awoke from that deathlike state, and then found that my father, attended by a crowd of people, was bearing me homeward in his arms; but I had then no recollection of what had happened, and at once relapsed into a state of unconsciousness. In this state I remained for a fortnight, as I afterwards learned. These days were a blank in my life; I could never bring any recollections to bear upon them; and when I awoke one morning to consciousness, it was as from a night of sleep. I saw that it was at least two hours later than my usual time of rising, and marvelled that I had been suffered to sleep so late. I attempted to spring up in bed, and was astonished to find that I could not even move. The utter prostration of my strength subdued all curiosity within me. I experienced no pain, but I felt that I was weak; I saw that I was treated as an invalid, and acquiesced in my condition, though some time passed-more time than the reader would imagine, before I could piece together my broken recollections so as to comprehend it. I was very slow in learning that my hearing was entirely gone. The unusual stillness of all things was grateful to me in my utter exhaustion; and if, in this half-awakened state, a thought of the matter entered my mind, I ascribed it to the unusual care and success of my friends in preserving silence around me. I saw them talking indeed to one another, and thought that out of regard to my feeble condition, they spoke in whispers, because I heard them not. The truth was revealed to me in consequence of my solici |