CHAPTER VI
A SENSE OF LOSS
"When the fire is strong, it soon appropriates to itself the matter which is heaped on it, and consumes it, and rises higher by means of this very material."—Marcus Aurelius.
Bessie Gilbert, when she was about twenty, differed but little from the sisters around her. She could read Italian, French, and German, and her mental culture had been an education of the true and best kind. She had an open mind, an ardent desire for knowledge, and a warm interest in all the ways and works of humanity. The one accomplishment possible to her was music, and from her childhood her singing and playing had given pleasure to herself and others. "She never could sing out of tune:" says a musical friend.
She readily gained friends, for she was sympathetic and kind, and inspired others with confidence. A lady, very young and shy at that time, remembers calling in Queen Anne Street, and feeling alarmed at every one except Bessie. Sitting by her side, and talking to her, the shyest were at their ease.
No hardships in her lot had up to this time come home to her. Indeed, it is very doubtful if the want of sight to those born blind or those who have lost the memory of sight, is in youth a greater conscious privation than the want of wings. By degrees a different condition is conceivable, because it is known in a certain way from description; but as no person born blind can exactly realise what sight is, or what it does, there is no conscious sense of loss. No person born blind can comprehend the nature of the impression that sight conveys. Red may be as "the sound of a trumpet," blue as the outer air, and green a something connected with the meadows and the delight of flowers and shade; but except to those who remember, the sense of sight is only a name for the incomprehensible.
Bessie did not remember, and therefore she did not know the special hardship of blindness and that sense of irreparable loss, of "wisdom at one entrance quite shut out," which is so heavy an affliction.