The music of nature is free to all and intelligible to all. No instruction is demanded to listen with rapture to the blithesome carol of the meadow-lark or the cheery notes of the wood-thrush, joyous denizens of our American fields. The many voices of the wind, now whispering secrets to the pines, now whistling impudently outside our windows, now strident and threatening through the bare branches of winter, bring us messages suited to all moods, and play melodies on our hearts as though their strings were stretched on an Æolian harp. On a sensitive mind the power of these sounds of the wind is altogether peculiar, and appears to be owing to the fact that the agency which produces them is hidden, veiled, and invisible. I would liken it to the effect of distant church bells, heard through the stillness of some Sabbath morn, soft, rhythmical, earnest, inviting us to sweet societies and unseen shrines. We appreciate too little the delight we almost unconsciously derive from the sense of hearing through the power it gives us to have unrestricted social intercourse in conversation, and to listen to oratory, instruction, and public entertainments. When we observe how even slight deafness circumscribes the life and reduces the number of its sources of enjoyment, we first understand the extent of the gratifications we owe to the faculty of audition, and how important to our happiness are its enjoyment and cultivation. But how vast is the capacity of man for happiness! How many sources of joy would remain to one deprived of every sense but that of Sight! All his life would not suffice to explore the boundless fields of enjoyment which it alone throws open to him. He has but to cast his eyes around him to revel in the ever-changing garb of earth, in the sky with its majestic clouds sailing across the measureless blue depths, in the splendors of sunrise and sunset, in the transient glory of the rainbow, and in the immortal light of the stars. Stretched on the strand, he may mark the far-off, many-hued, sparkling brine, or elsewhere see great mountains lift their summits to eternal snow and watch them bathed in the rosy glamour of the afterglow, seemingly suspended in mid-air, when night obscures their base.