Blind people : their works and ways with sketches of the lives of some famous blind men / by B.G. Johns.

  • Johns, B. G. (Bennett George)
Date:
1867
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Blind people : their works and ways with sketches of the lives of some famous blind men / by B.G. Johns. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    Unless he often opens the door and windows, and looks out into a freer world beyond, the dust and cobwebs soon thicken over every entrance of light, and in the perfect gloom he forgets that beyond and above there is an open, boundless, air. * And this is the very peril to which the blind boy is specially exposed. Doors and windows, entrances for living light, are the things he never opens; they are unknown to him, or utterly beyond his reach. If his friends are well off, and educated people, all the appliances that education demands and money can procure are at once brought to bear upon him. The hand of love leads him to the tree of knowledge, proves that it is within even his reach; shows to him a spark of light in the darkness, how the spark may be tanned into a flame, and the flame made to shine cheerily on the up-hill path. But if his friends be poor, or uneducated, the whole treatment is reversed. Too often he is pushed aside into a corner as an encumbrance, or at all events one for whom little or nothing can be done; treated perhaps not unkindly, but gradually spoiled in the worst sense of the word by a mixture * Sterling.