be ashamed of your company. In the city of Paris, where the art of cookery has its home and the Prohibition party no adherents, dyspepsia is scarcely heard of, and the arrests for drunkenness during the entire year of 1890 were—how many, think you?—just thirty-eight!
If I have dwelt with some emphasis on the pleasures of taste, it is because they are little understood in this country and there is a prevalent tendency to decry them. Those which are derived from the sense of Hearing will need no defense. Many of them are matters of constant and intelligent cultivation. We are said not to be a musical nation, but certainly both vocal and instrumental artists are not rare, and those from other countries find among us their most profitable harvest-fields. The intensity and the value of the enjoyment derived from music depend on individual peculiarities which are little modified by cultivation. Of all the exalted pleasures it is the one least communicable and least connected with other faculties. One of the finest pianists in the United States is a negro idiot, and intellectually an appreciative musical audience need not be above him. But I have been told that I have no right to speak about this art. Six generations of Quaker ancestors, who would not permit an instrument of music in the house, have nearly extinguished the musical sense in me.
The music of nature is free to all and intelligible to all. No instruction is demanded to listen with rapture to the blithesome carol of the meadow-lark or the cheery notes of
the wood-thrush, joyous denizens of our American fields. The many voices of the wind, now whispering secrets to the pines, now whistling impudently outside our windows, now strident and threatening through the bare branches of winter, bring us messages suited to all moods, and play melodies on our hearts as though their strings were stretched on an Æolian harp. On a sensitive mind the power of these sounds of the wind is altogether peculiar, and appears to be owing to the fact that the agency which produces them is hidden, veiled, and invisible. I would liken it to the effect of distant church bells, heard through the stillness of some Sabbath morn, soft, rhythmical, earnest, inviting us to sweet societies and unseen shrines.
We appreciate too little the delight we almost unconsciously derive from the sense of hearing through the power it gives us to have unrestricted social intercourse in conversation, and to listen to oratory, instruction, and public entertainments. When we observe how even slight deafness circumscribes the life and reduces the number of its sources of enjoyment, we first understand the extent of the gratifications we owe to the faculty of audition, and how important to our happiness are its enjoyment and cultivation.
But how vast is the capacity of man for happiness! How many sources of joy would remain to one deprived of every sense but that of Sight! All his life would not suffice to explore the boundless fields of enjoyment which it alone throws open to him. He has but to cast his eyes around
him to revel in the ever-changing garb of earth, in the sky with its majestic clouds sailing across the measureless blue depths, in the splendors of sunrise and sunset, in the transient glory of the rainbow, and in the immortal light of the stars. Stretched on the strand, he may mark the far-off, many-hued, sparkling brine, or elsewhere see great mountains lift their summits to eternal snow and watch them bathed in the rosy glamour of the afterglow, seemingly suspended in mid-air, when night obscures their base.
The beauties of form, line, color, and proportion are open to him, and the treasures of joy which the noble arts of painting, sculpture, architecture, drawing, and engraving have been laboring for thousands of years to enrich the world with in their fullness belong to him. The delicate suggestions of light-and-shade and the inexhaustible fertility of the colorist supply him with storehouses from which he can fill countless hours of gratification. Those elements in our nature which respond to the amusing, the pleasing, the picturesque, and the sublime are almost equally appealed to through the sense of sight; and were we to devote ourselves to answering their fascinating invitations, little leisure should we have left for occupation with any other sense. Nor among these have I enumerated those crowning delights to many minds, the faculty of acquainting themselves with the thoughts of others through reading, and giving perhaps equal pleasure to others by writing, both of which are chiefly conditioned on the sense of sight.
What I have written is but an outline, a scatter of unfinished suggestions, of the numerous enjoyments which we can obtain by the proper cultivation of our senses. Their training, and the rational development of all their functions, are just as essential to our higher life as the cultivation of those which are sometimes, though falsely, called our nobler faculties. There is no aristocracy in the kingdom of nature, and the lowest of our powers, if appropriately directed and educated, is as worthy to occupy the throne as any which in popular repute is deemed the highest.