eeeded in rectifying the carriage and manners of nearly all their pupils. As to their studies, the aim is as high as in the New-England Institution, and will, no doubt, be equally successful. The music was admirable, except for the pronunciation of words in the singing. It was a great pleasure to me to go and hear their musical exercises, they formed so good a band of instrumentalists, and sang so well. There were horns, flutes, violins, and the piano. As for humbler matters, besides the ornamental works of the girls, the fringes, braids, lampstands, &c., I saw a frock made by one of them during the leisure hours of one week. The work was excellent, the gathers of the skirt being stocked into the waistband as evenly and regularly as by a common mantuamaker. The girls' hair was dressed like that of other young ladies, only scarcely a hair was out of its place; and each blind girl dresses her own hair. They peel potatoes with the utmost accuracy, and as quickly as others. But, with all this care, their cultivation of mind is most attended to. The girls stand as good an examination as the boys in mental arithmetic, geography, and reading aloud.

Before I left Philadelphia the annual meeting of the public in the Music Hall, to see the progress of Mr. Friedlander's pupils, took place. I was requested to write the address to be delivered by one of the blind in the name of the rest; and now I found what the difficulty is to an inexperienced person, of throwing one's self into the mind of a being in such different circumstances, and uttering only what he might say with truth. I now saw that the common run of hymns and other compositions put into the mouths of the blind become no less cant when uttered by them, than the generality of the so-called religious tracts which are written for the poor. The blind do not know what they miss in not receiving the light of the sun; and they would never spontaneously lament about it, nor would they naturally try to be submissive and resigned about privations which they are only by inference aware of. Their resignation should be about evils whose pressure they actually feel. To a blind child it is a greater pain to have a thorn in its foot than not to have eyes; to a blind man it is a greater sorrow'not to have got his temper under control than to be shut out from the face of naThe joy of the sightless should, in the same manner, be for the positive powers they hold and the achievements they grasp, and not for what others call compensations for

ture.

what they do not miss. To bear all this in mind, and to conceive one's thoughts accordingly; to root out of the expression of thought every visual image, and substitute such, derived from other senses, as may arise naturally from the state of mind of the blind, is no easy task, as any one may find who tries. It led me into a speculation on the vast amount of empty words which the blind must swallow while seeking from books their intellectual food. We are all apt in reading to take in, as true and understood, a great deal more than we verify and comprehend; but, in the intercourses of the blind, what a tremendous proportion does the unreal bear to the real which is offered them!

I saw at the Deaf and Dumb Asylum at Boston one of those unhappy beings, the bare mention of whose case excites painful feelings of compassion. I was told that a young man who was deaf, dumb, and blind was on the premises, and he was brought to us. Impossible as it was to hold communication with him, we were all glad when, after standing and wandering awkwardly about, he turned from us and made his way out. He is not quite blind. He can distinguish light from darkness, but cannot be taught by any of the signs which are used with his deaf-mute companions. His temper is violent, and there seems to be no way of increasing his enjoyments. His favourite occupation is piling wood, and we saw him doing this with some activity, mounted on the woodpile.

It is now feared that the cases of this tremendous degree of privation are not so few as has been hitherto supposed. In a Memorial of the Genoa Deaf and Dumb Institution, it is stated that there are seven such cases in the Sardinian States on the mainland of Italy; and the probability is that about the same proportion as in other kinds of infirmity exists among other nations. Copious accounts have been given of three sufferers of this class; and a fourth, Hannah Lamb, who was accidentally burned to death in London at the age of nine years, has been mentioned in print. The three of whom we have been favoured with copious accounts are James Mitchell, who is described to us by Dugald Stewart; Victoria Morisseau, at Paris, by M. Bébian; and Julia Brace, at Hartford (Connecticut), by Mrs. Sigourney. All these have given evidence of some degree of intellectual activity, and feeling of right and wrong; enough to constitute a most affecting appeal to those who are too late to aid them,

but who may possibly be the means of saving others from falling into their state. The obligation lies chiefly on the medical profession. Every enlightened member of that profession laments that little is known about the diseases of the ear and their treatment. Whenever this organ, with its liabilities, becomes as well understood as that of sight, the number of deaf-mutes will doubtless be much reduced, and such cases as that of poor Julia Brace will probably disappear; at least the chances of the occurrence of such will be incalculably lessened.

The generosity of American society, already so active and extensive, will continue to be exerted in behalf of sufferers from the privation of the senses, till all who need it will be comprehended in its care. No one doubts that the charity will be done. The fear is lest the philosophy which should enlighten and guide the charity should be wanting. Such sufferers are apt to allure the observer, by means of his tenderest sympathies, into the imaginative regions of philosophy. Science and generosity equally demand that the allurement should be resisted. If observers will put away all mere imaginations respecting their charge; if they will cease` to approach them as superior beings in disguise, and look upon them as a peculiar class of children more than ordinarily ignorant, and ignorant in a remarkable direction, facts may be learned relative to the formation of mind and the exercise of intellect which may give cause to the race of ordinary men to look upon their infirm brethren with gratitude and love, as the medium through which new and great blessings have been conferred. By a union of inquirers and experimenters, by the speculative and practical cordially joining to work out the cases of human beings with four senses, the number might perhaps be speedily lessened of those who, seeing, see not, and who, hearing, hear not nor understand.

NAHANT.

"A breath of our free heaven and noble sires."

HEMANS.

THE whole coast of Massachusetts Bay is well worth the study of the traveller. Nothing can be more unlike than the aspect of the northern and southern extremities of the bay. Of Cape Ann, the northern point, with its bold shores and inexhaustible granite quarries, I have given some account in another book.* Not a ledge of rock is to be seen near Cape Cod, the southern extremity; but, instead of it, a sand so deep that travellers who have the choice of reaching it by horse or carriage prefer going over the last twenty miles on horseback; but then the sandhills are of so dazzling a whiteness as to distress the eyes. The inhabitants are a private race of fishermen and saltmen, dwelling in groundfloor houses, which are set down among the sand ridges without plan or order. Some communication is kept up between them and a yet more secluded race of citizens, the inhabitants of Nantucket and Martha's Vineyard, two islands which lie south of the southern peninsula of the bay. I much regretted that I had no opportunity of visiting these islands. Some stories that are abroad about the simplicity of the natives are enough to kindle the stranger's curiosity to see so fresh a specimen of human nature. In Nantucket there is not a tree, and scarcely a shrub. It is said that a fisherman's son, on accompanying his father for the first time to the mainland, saw a scrubby apple-tree. In great emotion, he cried, "Oh father! look there! what a beautiful tree! and what are those beautiful things on it? Are they lemons?" It was not my fortune to see any citizen of the United States who did not know an apple-tree at sight. It must be highly instructive to take a trip from this remarkable place across the bay to Nahant, in the month of August.

It was October when I visited Nahant, and all the gay birds of the summer had flown. I was not sorry for this,

: * Society in America, vol. i., page 281.

for fine people may be seen just as well in places where they are less in the way than on this rock. Nahant is a promontory which stretches out into the bay a few miles north of Boston; or it might rather be called two islands, connected with each other and with the mainland by ridges of sand and pebbles. The outermost of the islands is the larger, and it measures rather above a mile and a half in circumference. The whole promontory was bought, in the seventeenth century, by a certain farmer Dexter, of an Indian chief, Black Willy, for a suit of clothes. Probably the one party was as far as the other from foreseeing what use the place would be put to in the coming days. Nahant is now the resort of the Boston gentry in the hot months. Several of them have cottages on the promontory; and for those who are brought by the indefatigable steamboat, there is a stupendous hotel, the proportion of which to the place it is built on is as a man-of-war would be riding in one of the lovely Massachusetts ponds. Some middle-aged gentlemen remember the time when there was only one house on Nahant; and now there are balls in this hotel, where the extreme of dress and other luxury is seen, while the beach which connects the rock with the mainland is gay with hundreds of carriages and equestrians on bright summer mornings.

This beach consists of gray sand, beaten so hard by the action of the waves from the harbour on one side and the bay on the other, that the wheels of carriages make no impression, and the feet of horses resound as on the hardest road. It is the most delightful place for a drive or a gallop that can be imagined, except to the timorous, who may chance to find their horses frightened when the waves are boisterous on either hand at once. We entered upon it when the water was nearly at its height, and the passage was narWe had passed through the busy town of Lynn, and left its many hundreds of shoemaking families at their work behind us. We had passed many a field where the shoemaker, turned farmer for the season, was manuring his land with fishheads and offal; and now we burst into a region where no sounds of labour were heard, few signs of vegetation seen. We were alone with our own voices and the dashing of the sea, which seemed likely to take us off our feet.

row.

When we reached Great Nahant, several picturesque cot