Volume 1

The lost senses / By John Kitto.

  • John Kitto
Date:
1845
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The lost senses / By John Kitto. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    the slightest motion of his finger, and the faintest twinkle of his small eyes. lie has many years been dead, but I see him now, and dream of him sometimes. This experience certainly did not tend to diminish the feeling I have described, but it taught me to subdue its manifestations; and, eventually, travel and varied intercourse, went far to obtund the acute- ness of such perceptions. I am almost afraid to say anything about the moon. Yet in pursuing this subject, necessity is laid upon me to confess, that I have been moon- struck in my time. I must not refuse to acknow- ledge that when I have beheld the moon, “ walking in brightness,” my heart lias been “ secretly enticed” into feelings having perhaps a nearer approach to the old idolatries than I should like to ascertain. It is proper to mention this here, because I am strongly persuaded that my intense and almost agonizing enjoyment of this Crowning glory of the material universe, is owing in a great degree to the great force with which, by tiie privation of hearing, my soul was thrown exclusively upon its visual perceptions. And I mention this first, because, at this distant day, l have no recollection of earlier emotions connected with the beautiful, than those of which the moon was the object. How often, some two or three years after my affliction, did I not wander forth upon the hills, for no other purpose in the world than to enjoy and feed upon the emo- tions connected with the sense of the beautiful in nature. It gladdened me, it filled my heart, I knew not why or how, to view the “great and wide sea,” the wooded mountain, and even the silent town, under that pale radiance ; and not less to follow the
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