Webster’s ill-starred Duchess of Malfi assures her brother, “I will plant my soul in my ears to hear you.” _Je t’écoute sans cligner la paupière_, exclaims Marillac, in “Gerfaut,” _dût ta narration durer sept jours et sept nuits_. “Alarmed nature starts up in my heart, and opens a thousand ears to listen,” cries Colonel Talbot in an old play. Perplexed in the extreme, and cut to the heart, by a revelation of household treachery and wrong, an incredulous husband is described in a modern romance, with his hands clasped together, and with his head bent to catch every syllable of the harrowing news,—listening “as if his whole being were resolved into that one sense of hearing.” That reads like a literal translation of Balzac’s description of one whose whole _vie se concentra dans le seul sens de l’ouïe_. On another page he is not forgetful of _certains hommes_ who _se bouchent les oreilles pour ne plus rien entendre_. None so deaf as those who will not hear. Next to them may rank those who do not care to. The familiar narrative of “Eyes and No Eyes” might easily have its pendent and parallel, point by point, and paragraph by paragraph, in one to be called _Ears and No Ears_. It is with hearing as with seeing. The eye is not satisfied with seeing, nor the ear filled with hearing. Mendelssohn, in one of his letters from abroad, rapturous with gazing on his “favourite Titian,” declares that one “might well wish for a dozen more eyes to look one’s fill at such a picture.” “Had I three ears I’d hear thee!” exclaims Macbeth, when summoned to attend by the apparition of an Armed Head, in the witches’ cave. Just as one of Plato’s epigrams expresses a wish for the thousand eyes of the starry sky, that he might gaze his fill on the star of his life: εἴθε γενοίμην Οὐρανὸς, ὡς πολλοῖς ὄμμασιν ἐίς δὲ βλέπω. Horace uses the expressive phrase, _bibit aure_, in one of his odes—literally, “drink in with the ear”—a phrase admired by the commentators for its lyric boldness. “I was all fixed to listen,” says Dante, in the tenth gulf of _l’Inferno_. “O speak your counsel now, for Saturn’s ear is all a-hungered,” entreats the Titan, in Keats’s _Hyperion_. D’Artagnan, in the ante-chamber of M. de Treville, is described as looking with all his eyes and listening with all his ears, stretching his five senses so as to lose nothing. The same author tells how Mazarin listened, dying as he was, to Anne of Austria, as ten living men could not have listened. “Will you listen?” asks a prince in the same story; and is answered, “Can you ask me? You speak of a matter of life or death to me, and then ask if I will listen.”