at a distance of more than ten miles appear of deep indigo blue tinged with a delicate purple of inexpressible beauty.

The admirable paintings in the National Museum at Berlin, representing restorations of various places of classic celebrity, as Athens, Olympia, and Syracuse, convey this rich coloring of bluish purple in great vividness, but are not in the least degree overdrawn. They are among the most beautiful paintings in the world, and eminent scholars have regretted that they are not extensively reproduced.

It is probable that the climate of Greece, from a combination of several natural causes, is such that the atmospheric reflection and absorption become especially pronounced. And as this sky was evidently the same in classic antiquity as it is to-day, this color phenomenon affords an interesting proof of the unchanging climatic conditions. of that part of our globe during the last two thousand years.

In most parts of the United States our skies are whitened by water vapor, haze, and dust; and we usually see the deepest blue just after rainy days, when the haze and moisture have been precipitated, and the particles of dust washed out of the atmosphere by the falling rains.

It is perhaps fortunate, from an æsthetic point of view, that the appearance of the sky varies so much as it

does. The infinite varieties of color which it affords when so delicately frescoed with clouds of all forms and of all shades of color and intensity, combined with vegetable and mineral hues upon the land, whether in the green of spring, the smoky blue of Indian Summer, the purple of autumn, or the whiteness of winter, yield in due succession a constant mental relief, and have inspired most of the exquisite delineations of Nature in pictorial Art as well as in Literature. The soft hues with which the land is clothed give to the whole aspect of the world a lifelike appearance, and the light of the Sun reflected from the blue sky and luminous clouds fills the whole scene with such vivid radiation, that the Universe becomes to a modern student as truly an inspiration as the orderly and beautiful Cosmos was to the primitive Greeks. As Goethe says:"Angels are strengthen'd by the sight,

Though fathom thee no angel may ; Thy works still shine with splendour bright, As on Creation's primal day." Now that Science has at length added her share to these pleasurable contemplations by showing the causes from which the inspirations of the mind have sprung, the result of explaining the color of the sea and sky, phenomena often considered almost obvious and yet for long ages wholly obscure, may be ranked among the most gratifying triumphs of the human mind.

T. J. J. See.

THE world changes, and the minds of men. Helen Keller outstrips Laura Bridgman, as Rudyard Kipling out strips Maria Edgeworth. Will Helen herself appear quaint and old-fashioned fifty years hence, to a generation spoiled

1 Laura Bridgman. Dr. Howe's Famous Pupil and what He taught Her. By MAUD HOWE

by some still more daring recipient of its sympathy and wonder? We can answer such a question as little as Dr. Howe could have answered it fifty years ago; for the high-water mark of one age in every line of its prowess always seems and FLORENCE HOWE HALL. Boston: Little, Brown & Co. 1903.

"the limit," - at any rate the only limit positively imaginable to those who are living, and just what form and what direction Evolution will strike into when she takes her next step into novelty is ever a secret till the step is made. Laura was the limit in her day. The Ichild of seven was dumb and blind and almost without the sense of smell, with no plaything but an old boot which served for a doll, and with so little education in affection that she had never been taught to kiss. She was sternly handled at home, and was irascible and an object of fear and pity to all but one of the village neighbors, and that one was half-witted. The way in which she became in a few years, through Dr. Howe's devotion, an educated girl, delicate-mannered, spiritual-minded, and sweet-tempered, seemed such a miracle of philanthropic achievement that the fame of it spread not only over our country, but throughout Europe. It was regarded as a work of edification, a missionary feat. The Sunday-schools all heard of Laura as a soul buried alive but disentombed and brought into God's sunlight by science and religion working hand in hand. The few other blind deaf-mutes on whom attempts at rescue had been made - Oliver Caswell, Julia Brace, and others were so inferior that Laura's decidedly attenuated personality stood for the extreme of richness attainable by humanity when its experience was limited to the sense of touch alone. Of such all-sided ambitions and curiosities, of such untrammeled soarings and skimmings over the fields of language, of such completeness of memory and easy mastery of realities as Helen Keller has shown us, no one then had a dream.

It is now indeed the age of Kipling versus that of Edgeworth. Laura was primarily regarded as a phenomenon of conscience, almost a theological phenomenon. Helen is primarily a phenomenon of vital exuberance. Life for her is a series of adventures, rushed at with enthusiasm and fun. For Laura it was

more like a series of such careful indoor steps as a convalescent makes when the bed days are over. Helen's age is that of the scarehead and portrait be-spattered newspaper. In Laura's time the papers were featureless, and the public found as much zest in exhibitions at institutions for the deaf and dumb as it now finds in football games.

In contrast with the recklessly sensational terms in which everything nowadays expresses itself, there seems a sort of white veil of primness spread over this whole biography of Laura. All those who figure in it bear the stamp of conscience. Dr. Howe himself took his educative task religiously. It was his idea, as it was that of all the American liberals of his generation, that the soul has intuitive religious faculties which life will awaken, independently of revelation. Laura's nature was intensely moral, — almost morbidly so, in fact, and assimilated the conception of a Divine Ruler with great facility; but it does not appear certain that such an idea would have come to her spontaneously. She was easily converted into revivalistic evangelicism at the age of thirty-three, through communications which her biographers deplore as having perverted her originally optimistic faith. Her spiritual accomplishments seem to have been regarded rather as matters for wonder by the public of her day. But, granted a nature with a bent in the spiritual direction, it is hard to imagine conditions more favorable to its development than Laura's. Her immediate life, once it was redeemed (as Dr. Howe redeemed it) from quasi-animality, was almost wholly one of conduct toward other people. Her relations to "things," only tactile at best, were for the most part remote and hearsay and symbolic. Personal relations had to be her foreground,

and she was sent to her parents' home in New Hampshire. The withdrawal of the personal attentions with which at the Perkins Institution she had been so lovingly surrounded, the loss of the thousand communications which had fed her mental being daily, came near costing the sensitive creature her life. At the farm, mother, father, brothers, all had engrossing occupations, and no one could give time to the formidably tiresome task of manual alphabet conversation with Laura. She had to subsist mainly on her internal resources. Julia Brace would have turned over on her face and gone to sleep like a dog. Laura simply sickened unto death with moral starvation. "On one occasion she became so impatient with her mother for not talking with her, that she struck her!

and was immediately overcome with despair at her action. She brooded over it continually and would not be comforted. . . . Dr. Howe was summoned and found her a shadow of herself, dying of that subtle disease which we call homesickness." A friend, Miss Paddock, was sent to bring her home. It was bitter winter weather. When Miss Paddock came to the girl's bedside" and spelt into the nerveless hand these words: 'I have come to take you home,' a wave of color surged over the wan face. 'When do we start?' whispered the thin fingers. 'As soon as you can eat an egg,' answered the practical Paddock." Before they had covered half the distance to the railroad, Laura had fainted, but her will never faltered. "To Boston! to Boston that cry had gone up night and day from her homesick heart. . . . And her fingers flew faster and faster as the train brought her nearer. Would Doctor meet them? Was he glad she was coming? These two questions were repeated endlessly." At last they arrived, and in the warm and affectionate human atmosphere of the institution she soon recovered her vitality. It was an exquisite case of purely moral nostalgia. VOL. XCIII. NO. 555.

7

Laura never got a perfectly free use of the English language. Her style in writing was of a formality both quaint and charming. From the History of My Life, which she wrote at the age of thirty, I cull a few examples, slips of the pen and all, just as they were writ

ten:

"I was very full of mischief and fun. I was in such high spirits generally. I would cling to my Mother so wildly and peevishly many times. I took hold of her legs and arms as she strode across the room. She acted so plain as if it irritated her very much indeed. She scolded me sternly. I could not help feeling so cross and uneasy against her. I did not know any better. I never was taught to cultivate patience and mildness and placid until I came away from my blessed family at home. Sometimes

I took possession of a small room in the attic. I slept and sat there with some of my dear friends. I observed many different things in the garret, barrels containing grain and rye etc. and bags filled with flour wheat. I was very much alarmed by not finding a banister on the edge of the floor above the stairs. . . .

"I loved to sport with the cat very much. One morning I was sitting in my little rocking chair before the fire. I stretched out my hand toward the old cat and drew her up to my side. I indulged myself in having a game with her. It was so cruel a sport for the poor living being. I was extremely indiscreet and ignorant. I rejected the poor creature into the hot fire. My Mother came rushing suddenly and rescued the cat from her danger. She seemed very impulsive with the insent she shook and slapped me most sternly for my committing a sin against her dear cat. She punished me so severely that I could not endure the effect of it for a long time. She held two of the cat's paws up for me to discerne the mark of the flame of fire. My conscience told me at length that it was truly very wicked in me to have done

SO

a harm to her. It was very strange for the cat to go with the greatest fearful suspeetion. She concealed herself lucky some. The old cat never brought her company to her oldest home since she was banished from our sight. I cannot ask her the reason why she never retraced her natural steps. I am positive that it must be reality of her death now. The favorite cat had not faith in us that we should treat her more kindly and tenderly again. . . .

"Once I set a chair by the fire place; I was trying to reach the shelf to search for something. I drooped my central gravity down and I scorched my stomach so terribly that it effectually made me very unwell and worrisome." 1

There are endless interesting traits, some of them humanly touching, some of them priceless to the psychologist, scattered through this life of Laura. The question immediately suggests itself, Why was Laura so superior to other deaf-mutes, and why is Helen Keller so superior to Laura? Since Galton first drew attention to the subject, every one knows that in some of us the material of thought is mainly optical, in others auditory, etc., and the classification of human beings into the eye-minded, the earminded, and the motor-minded, is familiar. Of course if a person is born to be eye-minded, blindness will maim his life far more than if he is ear-minded originally. If ear-minded, deafness will maim him most. If he be natively constructed on a touch-minded or motor-minded plan, he will lose less than the others from either blindness or deafness. Touch-images and motor-images are the only terms that subjects "congenitally" blind and deaf can think in. It may be that Laura and Helen were originally meant to be more "tactile" and "motile" than their less successful rivals in the race for education, and that Helen, being more ex

1 I take these extracts from Professor Sanford's article on Laura Bridgman's writings, in

clusively motor-minded than any subject yet met with, is the one least crippled by the loss of her other senses.

But such comparisons are vague conjectures. What is not conjecture, but fact, is the philosophical conclusion which we are forced to draw from the cases both of Laura and of Helen. Their entire thinking goes on in tactile and motor symbols. Of the glories of the world of light and sound they have no inkling. Their thought is confined to the pallidest verbal substitutes for the realities which are its object. The mental material of which it consists would be considered by the rest of us to be of the deadliest insipidity. Nevertheless, life is full of absorbing interest to each of them, and in Helen's case thought is free and abundant in quite exceptional measure. What clearer proof could we ask of the fact that the relations among things, far more than the things themselves, are what is intellectually interesting, and that it makes little difference what terms we think in, so long as the relations maintain their character. All sorts of terms can transport the mind with equal delight, provided they be woven into equally massive and far-reaching schemes and systems of relationship. They are then equivalent for intellectual purposes, and for yielding intellectual pleasure, for the schemes and systems. are what the mind finds interesting.

Laura's life should find a place in every library. Dr. Howe's daughters have executed it with tact and feeling. No reader can fail to catch something of Laura's own touching reverence for the noble figure of "the Doctor." And if the ruddier pages which record Helen's exploits make the good Laura's image seem just a little anæmic by contrast, we cannot forget that there never could have been a Helen Keller if there had not been a Laura Bridgman.

William James. the Overland Monthly for 1887. For some reason they are omitted from the present volume.

M. Lennah.

THE good fairy evidently considered that she had done enough for Tommy when she gave him the eyes of a saint. Either she considered soul an unimportant matter, or left it to some other of the twelve invited fairies. The story of the christening has never been told, but it is barely possible that the thirteenth godmother cut off Thomas's supply of soul, or hampered its development in some way or other. At any rate, there is abundant room for this inference.

Fortunately for Tommy, however, a deficiency in soul is not so conspicuous as some mere physical imperfection, and no one ever looked once at the dear little fellow with his yellow hair fashionably bobbed, and his sweet little face with its great innocent black - fringed eyes, without longing to take him up and kiss him. And Tommy, even in trousers and short hair and the Fifth Grade, was still an angel so far as ocular expression was concerned.

But if Tommy was lacking in soul, Miss Laurel Petit, teacher of the Fifth Grade, was oversupplied with it. Ever since Miss Laurel began teaching, — and her career may be fitly epitomized by stating that she entered on her life-work when programme was spelled with the me and accented on the last syllable, and had taught through program, progr'm, and back to programme again,— she had been an ever-flowing fount of soulfulness in the arid desert of the threestory brick schoolhouse in which she presided over Grade 5A. Other teachers complained of stupidity, of the odor of onions and asafoetida bags worn to keep off contagion, which hung about certain classes, of supervisors, of new methods, but through it all, Miss Laurel, her head above the clouds, her sweet blue eyes slightly rolled upward, her plump form becomingly attired in dainty stylish gowns, knew nothing of such discomforts, but took fresh and ever-grow