the time of their entrance, like human beings who come to be educated.
All there are on an equality, except a very few of the people about the
house. The teachers are blind, and so all have to live on together on
the same terms. It is a community of persons with four senses. It is
here seen at once how inexpressibly absurd it is to be spending time and
wasting energy in bemoaning the absence of a fifth power, while there
are four existing to made use of. The universe is around them to be
studied, and life is before them to be conquered; and here they may be
set vigorously on their way. At first the pupils bitterly feel the want
of the caressing and pampering they have been used to at home. Some few,
who have come in too late, are found to have been irretrievably
incapacitated by it; but almost all revive in a surprisingly short time,
and experience so much enjoyment from their newly-acquired independence,
their sense of safety, their power of occupation, the cessation of all
pity and repining, and the novel feeling of equality with those about
them, that they declare themselves to have entered upon a new life. Many
drop expressions resembling that of one of the pupils, who declared that
she never thought before that it was a happy thing to live.
Their zeal about their occupations appears remarkable to those who do
not reflect that holyday is no pleasure to the blind, and idleness a
real punishment, as it is the one thing of which they have had too much
all their lives. They are eager to be busy from morning till night; and
the care of their teachers is to change their employments frequently,
as there is but little suspension of work. They have a playground, with
swings and other means of exercise; but one of the greatest difficulties
in the management is to cause these to be made a proper use of. The
blind are commonly indisposed to exercise; and in the New-England
Institution little is done in this way, though the pupils are shut out
into the open air once, and even twice a day in summer, the house doors
actually closed against them. They sit down in groups and talk, or bask
in some sunny corner of the grounds, hurrying back at the first signal
to their books, their music, their mat and basket making, sewing, and
travels on the map.
Another great difficulty is to teach them a good carriage and manners.
Blind children usually fall into a set of disagreeable habits while
other children are learning to look about them. They wag their heads,
roll their eyes, twitch their elbows, and keep their bodies in a
perpetual seesaw as often as they are left to themselves; and it is
surprising how much time and vigilance are required to make them sit,
stand, and walk like other people. As all directions to this purpose
must appear to them purely arbitrary, their faith in their instructers
has to be drawn upon to secure their obedience in these particulars, and
the work to be done is to break the habits of a life; so that it really
seems easier to them to learn a science or a language than to hold up
their heads and sit still on their chairs. The manners of the blind
usually show a great bashfulness on the surface of a prodigious vanity.
This is chiefly the fault of the seeing with whom they have intercourse.
If their compassionate visiters would suppress all tears and sighs, make
an effort to forget all about the sense that is absent, and treat them,
on the ground of the other four, as they would treat all other pupils in
any other school, the demeanour of the blind would nearly cease to be
peculiar. Their manners are rectified easily enough by the only method
which can ever avail for the cure of bad manners; by cultivating their
kindly feelings and their self-respect, and by accustoming them to good
society.
The studies at the institution at Boston are appointed according to the
principles laid down in the valuable report of the gentleman, Dr. Howe,
who studied the case of the blind in Europe, and who is now at the head
of the establishment under our notice. Among other principles is this,
"that the blind can attain as much excellence in mathematical,
geographical, astronomical, and other sciences, as many seeing persons;
and that he can become as good a teacher of music, language,
mathematics, and other sciences; all this and yet more can he do." The
ambition, from the very beginning of the enterprise, was far higher than
that of rescuing a few hundreds of blind persons from pauperism and
dependant habits; it was proposed to try how noble a company of beings
the blind might be made, and thus to do justice to the individuals under
treatment, and to lift up the whole class of the sightless out of a
state of depression into one of high honour, activity, and cheerfulness.
The story, besides being a pleasant one, is a fair illustration of
American charity in its principles and in its methods, and I will
therefore give it in brief. I do not believe there exists in American
literature any work breathing a more exhilarating spirit of hopefulness,
a finer tone of meek triumph, than the Reports of the New-England
Institution for the Education of the Blind.
It appears to be only about five-and-forty years since the education of
the blind was first undertaken; and it is much more recently that any
just idea has been formed by anybody of the actual number of the blind.
Even now few are aware how numerous they are. The born-blind are far
fewer than those who lose their sight in infancy. Taken together, the
numbers are now declared to be, in Egypt, one blind to every three
hundred; in Middle Europe, one to every eight hundred; in North Europe,
one in a thousand. In the United States, the number of blind is supposed
to be eight thousand at the very least.
The announcement of this fact caused a great sensation in New-England.
The good folks there who had been accustomed to bestow their kindness
each on some sightless old man or woman, or some petted blind child in
his own village, had not thought of comparing notes to ascertain how
many such cases there were, and were quite unaware of the numbers who in
towns sit wearing their cheerless lives away by their relations'
firesides; no immediate stimulus of want sending them forth into the
notice of the rich and the philanthropic.
The first step was the passing of an act by the legislature of
Massachusetts, incorporating trustees of the New-England Asylum for the
Blind. These trustees sent Dr. Howe to Europe to study the similar
institutions there, and bring back the necessary teachers and apparatus.
Dr. Howe's report on his return is extremely interesting. He brought
over a blind teacher from Paris, who, besides being skilled in the art
of communicating knowledge, is learned in the classics, history, and
mathematics. With him came a blind mechanic from Edinburgh, who
instructs the pupils in the different kinds of manufacture, on which
many of them depend for a subsistence.
Six young persons were taken at random from different parts of the State
of Massachusetts, and put under tuition. They were between the ages of
six and twenty years. At the end of five months all these six could read
correctly by the touch; had proceeded farther in arithmetic than seeing
children usually do in the same time; knew more of geography; had made
considerable attainment in music; and offered for sale moccasins and
doormats of as good quality and appearance as any sold in the shops of
Boston. The legislature testified its satisfaction by voting an annual
appropriation of six thousand dollars to the institution, on condition
of its boarding and educating, free of cost, twenty poor blind persons
from the State of Massachusetts.
The public was no less delighted. Every one began to inquire what he
could do. Money was given, objects were sought out; but some
rallying-point for all the effort excited was wanted. This was soon
supplied. A wealthy citizen of Boston, Colonel Perkins, offered his
mansion and outbuildings in Pearl-street as a residence for the pupils,
if, within a given time, funds were raised to support the establishment.
This act of munificence fully answered the purposes of the generous
citizen who performed it. Within one month upward of fifty thousand
dollars were contributed and placed to the credit of the institution.
The legislatures of three other New-England states have made
appropriations for the object; an estate joining Colonel Perkins's has
been purchased and thrown into a playground; the establishment contains
five officers and about fifty pupils, and it is in contemplation to
increase the accommodations so as to admit more. The funds are ample,
and the means of instruction of a very superior kind.
The business of the house is carried on by the pupils as far as
possible, and mechanical arts are taught with care and diligence; but
the rule of the establishment is to improve the mental resources of the
pupils to the utmost. Those who cannot do better are enabled to earn
their livelihood by the making of mats, baskets, and mattresses; but a
higher destination is prepared for all who show ability to become
organists of churches, and teachers of languages and science. I saw some
of the pupils writing, some sewing, some practising music, some reading.
I was struck with an expression of sadness in many of their faces, and
with a listlessness of manner in some; but I am aware that, owing to the
illness of the director and some other circumstances, I saw the
establishment to great disadvantage. I believe, however, that not a few
of its best friends, among whom may perchance be included some of its
managers themselves, would like to see more mirthful exercises and
readings introduced in the place of some of the exclusively religious
contemplations offered to the pupils. The best homage which the
guardians of the blind could offer to Him whose blessing they invoke is
in the thoroughly exercised minds of their charge; minds strong in
power, gay in innocence, and joyous in gratitude.
The institution which I had the best means of observing, and which
interested me more than any charitable establishment in America, was the
Philadelphia Asylum for the Blind. It was humble in its arrangements and
numbers when I first went, but before I left the country it seemed in a
fair way to flourish. It is impossible to overrate the merits of Mr.
Friedlander, its principal, in regard to it. The difficulties with which
he had to struggle, from confined space, deficient apparatus, and other
inconveniences resulting from narrow means, would have deterred almost
any one else from undertaking anything till better aid could be
provided. But he was cheered by the light which beamed out daily more
brightly from the faces of his little flock of pupils, and supported by
the intellectual power which they manifested from period to period of
their course. Of the eleven he found, to his delight, that no fewer than
"six were endowed with remarkable intellectual faculties, and three with
good ones; while, with regard to the remaining two, the development of
their minds might still be expected." A larger dwelling was next
engaged; the legislature showed an interest in the institution, and I
have no doubt it is by this time flourishing.
Mr. Friedlander and the matron, Miss Nicholls, had succeeded 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 nature. The 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 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.[11] 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
ground-floor 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.
Footnote 11: Society in America, vol. i., page 281.
It was October when I visited Nahant, and all the gay birds of the
summer had flown. I was not sorry for this, 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 narrow. We 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.
When we reached Great Nahant, several picturesque cottages of the
gentry came into view. All had piazzas, and several were adorned with
bright creeping plants. No inhabitants were visible. Some rows of
miserable young trees looked as if they were set up in order to be blown
down. Many attempts have been made to raise forest-trees, but hitherto
in vain. Some large willows grow in a partially sheltered spot, and
under these are the boarding-houses of the place. The verdure is scanty,
of course, and this is not the kind of beauty to be looked for in
Nahant. The charms of the place are in the distant views, and among the
picturesque and intricate rocks.
The variety contained within the circuit of a mile and a half is fully
known only to the summer residents; but we saw something of it. At one
moment we were prying into the recesses of the Swallows' Cave, listening
to the rumbling of the waves within it, making discoveries of birds'
nests, and looking up through its dark chasms to the sky. At the next we
caught a view, between two rising grounds, of Boston, East Boston, and
Chelsea, sitting afar off upon the sunny waters. Here and there was a
quiet strip of beach, where we sat watching the rich crop of weed swayed
to and fro by the spreading and retreating of the translucent waters;
and then at intervals we came to where the waves boil among the caverns,
making a busy roar in the stillest hour of the stillest day. Here all
was so chill and shadowy that the open sea, with its sunny sail and
canopy of pearly clouds, looked as if it were quite another region,
brought into view by some magic, but really lying on the other side of
the world.
There is a luxurious bathing-place for ladies, a little beach so shut in
by rocks, along the top of which runs a high fence, that the retirement
is complete. Near it is the Spouting Horn, where we sat an unmeasured
time, watching the rising tide spouting more magnificently every moment
from the recess called The Horn. Every wave rushed in and splashed out
again with a roar, the fragments of seaweed flying off like shot. A
clever little boy belonging to our party was meantime abroad among the
boarding-houses, managing to get us a dinner. He saved us all the
trouble, and came to summon us, and show us the way. His father could
not have managed better than he did.