Story of My Life
by
Helen Keller

Part 2 out of 8



little child; now my thoughts were turned inward, and I beheld
things invisible. Gradually I emerged from the penumbra of that
experience with a mind made clearer by trial and with a truer
knowledge of life.

The chief events of the year 1893 were my trip to Washington
during the inauguration of President Cleveland, and visits to
Niagara and the World's Fair. Under such circumstances my studies
were constantly interrupted and often put aside for many weeks,
so that it is impossible for me to give a connected account of
them.

We went to Niagara in March, 1893. It is difficult to describe my
emotions when I stood on the point which overhangs the American
Falls and felt the air vibrate and the earth tremble.

It seems strange to many people that I should be impressed by the
wonders and beauties of Niagara. They are always asking: "What
does this beauty or that music mean to you? You cannot see the
waves rolling up the beach or hear their roar. What do they mean
to you?" In the most evident sense they mean everything. I cannot
fathom or define their meaning any more than I can fathom or
define love or religion or goodness.

During the summer of 1893, Miss Sullivan and I visited the
World's Fair with Dr. Alexander Graham Bell. I recall with
unmixed delight those days when a thousand childish fancies
became beautiful realities. Every day in imagination I made a
trip round the world, and I saw many wonders from the uttermost
parts of the earth--marvels of invention, treasuries of industry
and skill and all the activities of human life actually passed
under my finger tips.

I liked to visit the Midway Plaisance. It seemed like the
"Arabian Nights," it was crammed so full of novelty and interest.
Here was the India of my books in the curious bazaar with its
Shivas and elephant-gods; there was the land of the Pyramids
concentrated in a model Cairo with its mosques and its long
processions of camels; yonder were the lagoons of Venice, where
we sailed every evening when the city and the fountains were
illuminated. I also went on board a Viking ship which lay a short
distance from the little craft. I had been on a man-of-war
before, in Boston, and it interested me to see, on this Viking
ship, how the seaman was once all in all--how he sailed and took
storm and calm alike with undaunted heart, and gave chase to
whosoever reechoed his cry, "We are of the sea!" and fought with
brains and sinews, self-reliant, self-sufficient, instead of
being thrust into the background by unintelligent machinery, as
Jack is to-day. So it always is--"man only is interesting to
man."

At a little distance from this ship there was a model of the
Santa Maria, which I also examined. The captain showed me
Columbus's cabin and the desk with an hour-glass on it. This
small instrument impressed me most because it made me think how
weary the heroic navigator must have felt as he saw the sand
dropping grain by grain while desperate men were plotting against
his life.

Mr. Higinbotham, President of the World's Fair, kindly gave me
permission to touch the exhibits, and with an eagerness as
insatiable as that with which Pizarro seized the treasures of
Peru, I took in the glories of the Fair with my fingers. It was a
sort of tangible kaleidoscope, this white city of the West.
Everything fascinated me, especially the French bronzes. They
were so lifelike, I thought they were angel visions which the
artist had caught and bound in earthly forms.

At the Cape of Good Hope exhibit, I learned much about the
processes of mining diamonds. Whenever it was possible, I touched
the machinery while it was in motion, so as to get a clearer idea
how the stones were weighed, cut, and polished. I searched in the
washings for a diamond and found it myself--the only true
diamond, they said, that was ever found in the United States.

Dr. Bell went everywhere with us and in his own delightful way
described to me the objects of greatest interest. In the
electrical building we examined the telephones, autophones,
phonographs, and other inventions, and he made me understand how
it is possible to send a message on wires that mock space and
outrun time, and, like Prometheus, to draw fire from the sky. We
also visited the anthropological department, and I was much
interested in the relics of ancient Mexico, in the rude stone
implements that are so often the only record of an age--the
simple monuments of nature's unlettered children (so I thought as
I fingered them) that seem bound to last while the memorials of
kings and sages crumble in dust away--and in the Egyptian
mummies, which I shrank from touching. From these relics I
learned more about the progress of man than I have heard or read
since.

All these experiences added a great many new terms to my
vocabulary, and in the three weeks I spent at the Fair I took a
long leap from the little child's interest in fairy tales and
toys to the appreciation of the real and the earnest in the
workaday world.



Chapter XVI

Before October, 1893, I had studied various subjects by myself in
a more or less desultory manner. I read the histories of Greece,
Rome and the United States. I had a French grammar in raised
print, and as I already knew some French, I often amused myself
by composing in my head short exercises, using the new words as I
came across them, and ignoring rules and other technicalities as
much as possible. I even tried, without aid, to master the French
pronunciation, as I found all the letters and sounds described in
the book. Of course this was tasking slender powers for great
ends; but it gave me something to do on a rainy day, and I
acquired a sufficient knowledge of French to read with pleasure
La Fontaine's "Fables," "Le Medecin Malgre Lui" and passages from
"Athalie."

I also gave considerable time to the improvement of my speech. I
read aloud to Miss Sullivan and recited passages from my
favourite poets, which I had committed to memory; she corrected
my pronunciation and helped me to phrase and inflect. It was not,
however, until October, 1893, after I had recovered from the
fatigue and excitement of my visit to the World's Fair, that I
began to have lessons in special subjects at fixed hours.

Miss Sullivan and I were at that time in Hulton, Pennsylvania,
visiting the family of Mr. William Wade. Mr. Irons, a neighbour
of theirs, was a good Latin scholar; it was arranged that I
should study under him. I remember him as a man of rare, sweet
nature and of wide experience. He taught me Latin grammar
principally; but he often helped me in arithmetic, which I found
as troublesome as it was uninteresting. Mr. Irons also read with
me Tennyson's "In Memoriam." I had read many books before, but
never from a critical point of view. I learned for the first time
to know an author, to recognize his style as I recognize the
clasp of a friend's hand.

At first I was rather unwilling to study Latin grammar. It seemed
absurd to waste time analyzing, every word I came across--noun,
genitive, singular, feminine--when its meaning was quite plain. I
thought I might just as well describe my pet in order to know
it--order, vertebrate; division, quadruped; class, mammalia;
genus, felinus; species, cat; individual, Tabby. But as I got
deeper into the subject, I became more interested, and the beauty
of the language delighted me. I often amused myself by reading
Latin passages, picking up words I understood and trying to make
sense. I have never ceased to enjoy this pastime.

There is nothing more beautiful, I think, than the evanescent
fleeting images and sentiments presented by a language one is
just becoming familiar with--ideas that flit across the mental
sky, shaped and tinted by capricious fancy. Miss Sullivan sat
beside me at my lessons, spelling into my hand whatever Mr. Irons
said, and looking up new words for me. I was just beginning to
read Caesar's "Gallic War" when I went to my home in Alabama.



Chapter XVII

In the summer of 1894, I attended the meeting at Chautauqua of
the American Association to Promote the Teaching of Speech to the
Deaf. There it was arranged that I should go to the
Wright-Humason School for the Deaf in New York City. I went there
in October, 1894, accompanied by Miss Sullivan. This school was
chosen especially for the purpose of obtaining the highest
advantages in vocal culture and training in lip-reading. In
addition to my work in these subjects, I studied, during the two
years I was in the school, arithmetic, physical geography, French
and German.

Miss Reamy, my German teacher, could use the manual alphabet, and
after I had acquired a small vocabulary, we talked together in
German whenever we had a chance, and in a few months I could
understand almost everything she said. Before the end of the
first year I read "Wilhelm Tell" with the greatest delight.
Indeed, I think I made more progress in German than in any of my
other studies. I found French much more difficult. I studied it
with Madame Olivier, a French lady who did not know the manual
alphabet, and who was obliged to give her instruction orally. I
could not read her lips easily; so my progress was much slower
than in German. I managed, however, to read "Le Medecin Malgre
Lui" again. It was very amusing but I did not like it nearly so
well as "Wilhelm Tell."

My progress in lip-reading and speech was not what my teachers
and I had hoped and expected it would be. It was my ambition to
speak like other people, and my teachers believed that this could
be accomplished; but, although we worked hard and faithfully, yet
we did not quite reach our goal. I suppose we aimed too high, and
disappointment was therefore inevitable. I still regarded
arithmetic as a system of pitfalls. I hung about the dangerous
frontier of "guess," avoiding with infinite trouble to myself and
others the broad valley of reason. When I was not guessing, I was
jumping at conclusions, and this fault, in addition to my
dullness, aggravated my difficulties more than was right or
necessary.

But although these disappointments caused me great depression at
times, I pursued my other studies with unflagging interest,
especially physical geography. It was a joy to learn the secrets
of nature: how--in the picturesque language of the Old
Testament--the winds are made to blow from the four corners of
the heavens, how the vapours ascend from the ends of the earth,
how rivers are cut out among the rocks, and mountains overturned
by the roots, and in what ways man may overcome many forces
mightier than himself. The two years in New York were happy ones,
and I look back to them with genuine pleasure.

I remember especially the walks we all took together every day in
Central Park, the only part of the city that was congenial to me.
I never lost a jot of my delight in this great park. I loved to
have it described every time I entered it; for it was beautiful
in all its aspects, and these aspects were so many that it was
beautiful in a different way each day of the nine months I spent
in New York.

In the spring we made excursions to various places of interest.
We sailed on the Hudson River and wandered about on its green
banks, of which Bryant loved to sing. I liked the simple, wild
grandeur of the palisades. Among the places I visited were West
Point, Tarrytown, the home of Washington Irving, where I walked
through "Sleepy Hollow."

The teachers at the Wright-Humason School were always planning
how they might give the pupils every advantage that those who
hear enjoy--how they might make much of few tendencies and
passive memories in the cases of the little ones--and lead them
out of the cramping circumstances in which their lives were set.

Before I left New York, these bright days were darkened by the
greatest sorrow that I have ever borne, except the death of my
father. Mr. John P. Spaulding, of Boston, died in February, 1896.
Only those who knew and loved him best can understand what his
friendship meant to me. He, who made every one happy in a
beautiful, unobtrusive way, was most kind and tender to Miss
Sullivan and me. So long as we felt his loving presence and knew
that he took a watchful interest in our work, fraught with so
many difficulties, we could not be discouraged. His going away
left a vacancy in our lives that has never been filled.



Chapter XVIII

In October, 1896, I entered the Cambridge School for Young
Ladies, to be prepared for Radcliffe.

When I was a little girl, I visited Wellesley and surprised my
friends by the announcement, "Some day I shall go to college--but
I shall go to Harvard!" When asked why I would not go to
Wellesley, I replied that there were only girls there. The
thought of going to college took root in my heart and became an
earnest desire, which impelled me to enter into competition for a
degree with seeing and hearing girls, in the face of the strong
opposition of many true and wise friends. When I left New York
the idea had become a fixed purpose; and it was decided that I
should go to Cambridge. This was the nearest approach I could get
to Harvard and to the fulfillment of my childish declaration.

At the Cambridge School the plan was to have Miss Sullivan attend
the classes with me and interpret to me the instruction given.

Of course my instructors had had no experience in teaching any
but normal pupils, and my only means of conversing with them was
reading their lips. My studies for the first year were English
history, English literature, German, Latin, arithmetic, Latin
composition and occasional themes. Until then I had never taken a
course of study with the idea of preparing for college; but I had
been well drilled in English by Miss Sullivan, and it soon became
evident to my teachers that I needed no special instruction in
this subject beyond a critical study of the books prescribed by
the college. I had had, moreover, a good start in French, and
received six months' instruction in Latin; but German was the
subject with which I was most familiar.

In spite, however, of these advantages, there were serious
drawbacks to my progress. Miss Sullivan could not spell out in my
hand all that the books required, and it was very difficult to
have textbooks embossed in time to be of use to me, although my
friends in London and Philadelphia were willing to hasten the
work. For a while, indeed, I had to copy my Latin in braille, so
that I could recite with the other girls. My instructors soon
became sufficiently familiar with my imperfect speech to answer
my questions readily and correct mistakes. I could not make notes
in class or write exercises; but I wrote all my compositions and
translations at home on my typewriter.

Each day Miss Sullivan went to the classes with me and spelled
into my hand with infinite patience all that the teachers said.
In study hours she had to look up new words for me and read and
reread notes and books I did not have in raised print. The tedium
of that work is hard to conceive. Frau Grote, my German teacher,
and Mr. Gilman, the principal, were the only teachers in the
school who learned the finger alphabet to give me instruction. No
one realized more fully than dear Frau Grote how slow and
inadequate her spelling was. Nevertheless, in the goodness of her
heart she laboriously spelled out her instructions to me in
special lessons twice a week, to give Miss Sullivan a little
rest. But, though everybody was kind and ready to help us, there
was only one hand that could turn drudgery into pleasure.

That year I finished arithmetic, reviewed my Latin grammar, and
read three chapters of Caesar's "Gallic War." In German I read,
partly with my fingers and partly with Miss Sullivan's
assistance, Schiller's "Lied von der Glocke" and "Taucher,"
Heine's "Harzreise," Freytag's "Aus dem Staat Friedrichs des
Grossen," Riehl's "Fluch Der Schonheit," Lessing's "Minna von
Barnhelm," and Goethe's "Aus meinem Leben." I took the greatest
delight in these German books, especially Schiller's wonderful
lyrics, the history of Frederick the Great's magnificent
achievements and the account of Goethe's life. I was sorry to
finish "Die Harzreise," so full of happy witticisms and charming
descriptions of vine-clad hills, streams that sing and ripple in
the sunshine, and wild regions, sacred to tradition and legend,
the gray sisters of a long-vanished, imaginative
age--descriptions such as can be given only by those to whom
nature is "a feeling, a love and an appetite."

Mr. Gilman instructed me part of the year in English literature.
We read together, "As You Like It," Burke's "Speech on
Conciliation with America," and Macaulay's "Life of Samuel
Johnson." Mr. Gilman's broad views of history and literature and
his clever explanations made my work easier and pleasanter than
it could have been had I only read notes mechanically with the
necessarily brief explanations given in the classes.

Burke's speech was more instructive than any other book on a
political subject that I had ever read. My mind stirred with the
stirring times, and the characters round which the life of two
contending nations centred seemed to move right before me. I
wondered more and more, while Burke's masterly speech rolled on
in mighty surges of eloquence, how it was that King George and
his ministers could have turned a deaf ear to his warning
prophecy of our victory and their humiliation. Then I entered
into the melancholy details of the relation in which the great
statesman stood to his party and to the representatives of the
people. I thought how strange it was that such precious seeds of
truth and wisdom should have fallen among the tares of ignorance
and corruption.

In a different way Macaulay's "Life of Samuel Johnson" was
interesting. My heart went out to the lonely man who ate the
bread of affliction in Grub Street, and yet, in the midst of toil
and cruel suffering of body and soul, always had a kind word, and
lent a helping hand to the poor and despised. I rejoiced over all
his successes, I shut my eyes to his faults, and wondered, not
that he had them, but that they had not crushed or dwarfed his
soul. But in spite of Macaulay's brilliancy and his admirable
faculty of making the commonplace seem fresh and picturesque, his
positiveness wearied me at times, and his frequent sacrifices of
truth to effect kept me in a questioning attitude very unlike the
attitude of reverence in which I had listened to the Demosthenes
of Great Britain.

At the Cambridge school, for the first time in my life, I enjoyed
the companionship of seeing and hearing girls of my own age. I
lived with several others in one of the pleasant houses connected
with the school, the house where Mr. Howells used to live, and we
all had the advantage of home life. I joined them in many of
their games, even blind man's buff and frolics in the snow; I
took long walks with them; we discussed our studies and read
aloud the things that interested us. Some of the girls learned to
speak to me, so that Miss Sullivan did not have to repeat their
conversation.

At Christmas, my mother and little sister spent the holidays with
me, and Mr. Gilman kindly offered to let Mildred study in his
school. So Mildred stayed with me in Cambridge, and for six happy
months we were hardly ever apart. It makes me most happy to
remember the hours we spent helping each other in study and
sharing our recreation together.

I took my preliminary examinations for Radcliffe from the 29th of
June to the 3rd of July in 1897. The subjects I offered were
Elementary and Advanced German, French, Latin, English, and Greek
and Roman history, making nine hours in all. I passed in
everything, and received "honours" in German and English.

Perhaps an explanation of the method that was in use when I took
my examinations will not be amiss here. The student was required
to pass in sixteen hours--twelve hours being called elementary
and four advanced. He had to pass five hours at a time to have
them counted. The examination papers were given out at nine
o'clock at Harvard and brought to Radcliffe by a special
messenger. Each candidate was known, not by his name, but by a
number. I was No. 233, but, as I had to use a typewriter, my
identity could not be concealed.

It was thought advisable for me to have my examinations in a room
by myself, because the noise of the typewriter might disturb the
other girls. Mr. Gilman read all the papers to me by means of the
manual alphabet. A man was placed on guard at the door to prevent
interruption.

The first day I had German. Mr. Gilman sat beside me and read the
paper through first, then sentence by sentence, while I repeated
the words aloud, to make sure that I understood him perfectly.
The papers were difficult, and I felt very anxious as I wrote out
my answers on the typewriter. Mr. Gilman spelled to me what I had
written, and I made such changes as I thought necessary, and he
inserted them. I wish to say here that I have not had this
advantage since in any of my examinations. At Radcliffe no one
reads the papers to me after they are written, and I have no
opportunity to correct errors unless I finish before the time is
up. In that case I correct only such mistakes as I can recall in
the few minutes allowed, and make notes of these corrections at
the end of my paper. If I passed with higher credit in the
preliminaries than in the finals, there are two reasons. In the
finals, no one read my work over to me, and in the preliminaries
I offered subjects with some of which I was in a measure familiar
before my work in the Cambridge school; for at the beginning of
the year I had passed examinations in English, History, French
and German, which Mr. Gilman gave me from previous Harvard
papers.

Mr. Gilman sent my written work to the examiners with a
certificate that I, candidate No. 233, had written the papers.

All the other preliminary examinations were conducted in the same
manner. None of them was so difficult as the first. I remember
that the day the Latin paper was brought to us, Professor
Schilling came in and informed me I had passed satisfactorily in
German. This encouraged me greatly, and I sped on to the end of
the ordeal with a light heart and a steady hand.



Chapter XIX

When I began my second year at the Gilman school, I was full of
hope and determination to succeed. But during the first few weeks
I was confronted with unforeseen difficulties. Mr. Gilman had
agreed that that year I should study mathematics principally. I
had physics, algebra, geometry, astronomy, Greek and Latin.
Unfortunately, many of the books I needed had not been embossed
in time for me to begin with the classes, and I lacked important
apparatus for some of my studies. The classes I was in were very
large, and it was impossible for the teachers to give me special
instruction. Miss Sullivan was obliged to read all the books to
me, and interpret for the instructors, and for the first time in
eleven years it seemed as if her dear hand would not be equal to
the task.

It was necessary for me to write algebra and geometry in class
and solve problems in physics, and this I could not do until we
bought a braille writer, by means of which I could put down the
steps and processes of my work. I could not follow with my eyes
the geometrical figures drawn on the blackboard, and my only
means of getting a clear idea of them was to make them on a
cushion with straight and curved wires, which had bent and
pointed ends. I had to carry in my mind, as Mr. Keith says in his
report, the lettering of the figures, the hypothesis and
conclusion, the construction and the process of the proof. In a
word, every study had its obstacles. Sometimes I lost all courage
and betrayed my feelings in a way I am ashamed to remember,
especially as the signs of my trouble were afterward used against
Miss Sullivan, the only person of all the kind friends I had
there, who could make the crooked straight and the rough places
smooth.

Little by little, however, my difficulties began to disappear.
The embossed books and other apparatus arrived, and I threw
myself into the work with renewed confidence. Algebra and
geometry were the only studies that continued to defy my efforts
to comprehend them. As I have said before, I had no aptitude for
mathematics; the different points were not explained to me as
fully as I wished. The geometrical diagrams were particularly
vexing because I could not see the relation of the different
parts to one another, even on the cushion. It was not until Mr.
Keith taught me that I had a clear idea of mathematics.

I was beginning to overcome these difficulties when an event
occurred which changed everything.

Just before the books came, Mr. Gilman had begun to remonstrate
with Miss Sullivan on the ground that I was working too hard, and
in spite of my earnest protestations, he reduced the number of my
recitations. At the beginning we had agreed that I should, if
necessary, take five years to prepare for college, but at the end
of the first year the success of my examinations showed Miss
Sullivan, Miss Harbaugh (Mr. Gilman's head teacher), and one
other, that I could without too much effort complete my
preparation in two years more. Mr. Gilman at first agreed to
this; but when my tasks had become somewhat perplexing, he
insisted that I was overworked, and that I should remain at his
school three years longer. I did not like his plan, for I wished
to enter college with my class.

On the seventeenth of November I was not very well, and did not
go to school. Although Miss Sullivan knew that my indisposition
was not serious, yet Mr. Gilman, on hearing of it, declared that
I was breaking down and made changes in my studies which would
have rendered it impossible for me to take my final examinations
with my class. In the end the difference of opinion between Mr.
Gilman and Miss Sullivan resulted in my mother's withdrawing my
sister Mildred and me from the Cambridge school.

After some delay it was arranged that I should continue my
studies under a tutor, Mr. Merton S. Keith, of Cambridge. Miss
Sullivan and I spent the rest of the winter with our friends, the
Chamberlins in Wrentham, twenty-five miles from Boston.

From February to July, 1898, Mr. Keith came out to Wrentham twice
a week, and taught me algebra, geometry, Greek and Latin. Miss
Sullivan interpreted his instruction.

In October, 1898, we returned to Boston. For eight months Mr.
Keith gave me lessons five times a week, in periods of about an
hour. He explained each time what I did not understand in the
previous lesson, assigned new work, and took home with him the
Greek exercises which I had written during the week on my
typewriter, corrected them fully, and returned them to me.

In this way my preparation for college went on without
interruption. I found it much easier and pleasanter to be taught
by myself than to receive instruction in class. There was no
hurry, no confusion. My tutor had plenty of time to explain what
I did not understand, so I got on faster and did better work than
I ever did in school. I still found more difficulty in mastering
problems in mathematics than I did in any other of my studies. I
wish algebra and geometry had been half as easy as the languages
and literature. But even mathematics Mr. Keith made interesting;
he succeeded in whittling problems small enough to get through my
brain. He kept my mind alert and eager, and trained it to reason
clearly, and to seek conclusions calmly and logically, instead of
jumping wildly into space and arriving nowhere. He was always
gentle and forbearing, no matter how dull I might be, and believe
me, my stupidity would often have exhausted the patience of Job.

On the 29th and 30th of June, 1899, I took my final examinations
for Radcliffe College. The first day I had Elementary Greek and
Advanced Latin, and the second day Geometry, Algebra and Advanced
Greek.

The college authorities did not allow Miss Sullivan to read the
examination papers to me; so Mr. Eugene C. Vining, one of the
instructors at the Perkins Institution for the Blind, was
employed to copy the papers for me in American braille. Mr.
Vining was a stranger to me, and could not communicate with me,
except by writing braille. The proctor was also a stranger, and
did not attempt to communicate with me in any way.

The braille worked well enough in the languages, but when it came
to geometry and algebra, difficulties arose. I was sorely
perplexed, and felt discouraged wasting much precious time,
especially in algebra. It is true that I was familiar with all
literary braille in common use in this country--English,
American, and New York Point; but the various signs and symbols
in geometry and algebra in the three systems are very different,
and I had used only the English braille in my algebra.

Two days before the examinations, Mr. Vining sent me a braille
copy of one of the old Harvard papers in algebra. To my dismay I
found that it was in the American notation. I sat down
immediately and wrote to Mr. Vining, asking him to explain the
signs. I received another paper and a table of signs by return
mail, and I set to work to learn the notation. But on the night
before the algebra examination, while I was struggling over some
very complicated examples, I could not tell the combinations of
bracket, brace and radical. Both Mr. Keith and I were distressed
and full of forebodings for the morrow; but we went over to the
college a little before the examination began, and had Mr. Vining
explain more fully the American symbols.

In geometry my chief difficulty was that I had always been
accustomed to read the propositions in line print, or to have
them spelled into my hand; and somehow, although the propositions
were right before me, I found the braille confusing, and could
not fix clearly in my mind what I was reading. But when I took up
algebra I had a harder time still. The signs, which I had so
lately learned, and which I thought I knew, perplexed me.
Besides, I could not see what I wrote on my typewriter. I had
always done my work in braille or in my head. Mr. Keith had
relied too much on my ability to solve problems mentally, and had
not trained me to write examination papers. Consequently my work
was painfully slow, and I had to read the examples over and over
before I could form any idea of what I was required to do.
Indeed, I am not sure now that I read all the signs correctly. I
found it very hard to keep my wits about me.

But I do not blame any one. The administrative board of Radcliffe
did not realize how difficult they were making my examinations,
nor did they understand the peculiar difficulties I had to
surmount. But if they unintentionally placed obstacles in my way,
I have the consolation of knowing that I overcame them all.



Chapter XX

The struggle for admission to college was ended, and I could now
enter Radcliffe whenever I pleased. Before I entered college,
however, it was thought best that I should study another year
under Mr. Keith. It was not, therefore, until the fall of 1900
that my dream of going to college was realized.

I remember my first day at Radcliffe. It was a day full of
interest for me. I had looked forward to it for years. A potent
force within me, stronger than the persuasion of my friends,
stronger even than the pleadings of my heart, had impelled me to
try my strength by the standards of those who see and hear. I
knew that there were obstacles in the way; but I was eager to
overcome them. I had taken to heart the words of the wise Roman
who said, "To be banished from Rome is but to live outside of
Rome." Debarred from the great highways of knowledge, I was
compelled to make the journey across country by unfrequented
roads--that was all; and I knew that in college there were many
bypaths where I could touch hands with girls who were thinking,
loving and struggling like me.

I began my studies with eagerness. Before me I saw a new world
opening in beauty and light, and I felt within me the capacity to
know all things. In the wonderland of Mind I should be as free as
another. Its people, scenery, manners, joys, tragedies should be
living, tangible interpreters of the real world. The
lecture-halls seemed filled with the spirit of the great and the
wise, and I thought the professors were the embodiment of wisdom.
If I have since learned differently, I am not going to tell
anybody.

But I soon discovered that college was not quite the romantic
lyceum I had imagined. Many of the dreams that had delighted my
young inexperience became beautifully less and "faded into the
light of common day." Gradually I began to find that there were
disadvantages in going to college.

The one I felt and still feel most is lack of time. I used to
have time to think, to reflect, my mind and I. We would sit
together of an evening and listen to the inner melodies of the
spirit, which one hears only in leisure moments when the words of
some loved poet touch a deep, sweet chord in the soul that until
then had been silent. But in college there is no time to commune
with one's thoughts. One goes to college to learn, it seems, not
to think. When one enters the portals of learning, one leaves the
dearest pleasures--solitude, books and imagination--outside with
the whispering pines. I suppose I ought to find some comfort in
the thought that I am laying up treasures for future enjoyment,
but I am improvident enough to prefer present joy to hoarding
riches against a rainy day.

My studies the first year were French, German, history, English
composition and English literature. In the French course I read
some of the works of Corneille, Moliere, Racine, Alfred de Musset
and Sainte-Beuve, and in the German those of Goethe and Schiller.
I reviewed rapidly the whole period of history from the fall of
the Roman Empire to the eighteenth century, and in English
literature studied critically Milton's poems and "Areopagitica."

I am frequently asked how I overcome the peculiar conditions
under which I work in college. In the classroom I am of course
practically alone. The professor is as remote as if he were
speaking through a telephone. The lectures are spelled into my
hand as rapidly as possible, and much of the individuality of the
lecturer is lost to me in the effort to keep in the race. The
words rush through my hand like hounds in pursuit of a hare which
they often miss. But in this respect I do not think I am much
worse off than the girls who take notes. If the mind is occupied
with the mechanical process of hearing and putting words on paper
at pell-mell speed, I should not think one could pay much
attention to the subject under consideration or the manner in
which it is presented. I cannot make notes during the lectures,
because my hands are busy listening. Usually I jot down what I
can remember of them when I get home. I write the exercises,
daily themes, criticisms and hour-tests, the mid-year and final
examinations, on my typewriter, so that the professors have no
difficulty in finding out how little I know. When I began the
study of Latin prosody, I devised and explained to my professor a
system of signs indicating the different meters and quantities.

I use the Hammond typewriter. I have tried many machines, and I
find the Hammond is the best adapted to the peculiar needs of my
work. With this machine movable type shuttles can be used, and
one can have several shuttles, each with a different set of
characters--Greek, French, or mathematical, according to the kind
of writing one wishes to do on the typewriter. Without it, I
doubt if I could go to college.

Very few of the books required in the various courses are printed
for the blind, and I am obliged to have them spelled into my
hand. Consequently I need more time to prepare my lessons than
other girls. The manual part takes longer, and I have
perplexities which they have not. There are days when the close
attention I must give to details chafes my spirit, and the
thought that I must spend hours reading a few chapters, while in
the world without other girls are laughing and singing and
dancing, makes me rebellious; but I soon recover my buoyancy and
laugh the discontent out of my heart. For, after all, every one
who wishes to gain true knowledge must climb the Hill Difficulty
alone, and since there is no royal road to the summit, I must
zigzag it in my own way. I slip back many times, I fall, I stand
still, I run against the edge of hidden obstacles, I lose my
temper and find it again and keep it better, I trudge on, I gain
a little, I feel encouraged, I get more eager and climb higher
and begin to see the widening horizon. Every struggle is a
victory. One more effort and I reach the luminous cloud, the blue
depths of the sky, the uplands of my desire. I am not always
alone, however, in these struggles. Mr. William Wade and Mr. E.
E. Allen, Principal of the Pennsylvania Institution for the
Instruction of the Blind, get for me many of the books I need in
raised print. Their thoughtfulness has been more of a help and
encouragement to me than they can ever know.

Last year, my second year at Radcliffe, I studied English
composition, the Bible as English composition, the governments of
America and Europe, the Odes of Horace, and Latin comedy. The
class in composition was the pleasantest. It was very lively. The
lectures were always interesting, vivacious, witty; for the
instructor, Mr. Charles Townsend Copeland, more than any one else
I have had until this year, brings before you literature in all
its original freshness and power. For one short hour you are
permitted to drink in the eternal beauty of the old masters
without needless interpretation or exposition. You revel in their
fine thoughts. You enjoy with all your soul the sweet thunder of
the Old Testament, forgetting the existence of Jahweh and Elohim;
and you go home feeling that you have had "a glimpse of that
perfection in which spirit and form dwell in immortal harmony;
truth and beauty bearing a new growth on the ancient stem of
time."

This year is the happiest because I am studying subjects that
especially interest me, economics, Elizabethan literature,
Shakespeare under Professor George L. Kittredge, and the History
of Philosophy under Professor Josiah Royce. Through philosophy
one enters with sympathy of comprehension into the traditions of
remote ages and other modes of thought, which erewhile seemed
alien and without reason.

But college is not the universal Athens I thought it was. There
one does not meet the great and the wise face to face; one does
not even feel their living touch. They are there, it is true; but
they seem mummified. We must extract them from the crannied wall
of learning and dissect and analyze them before we can be sure
that we have a Milton or an Isaiah, and not merely a clever
imitation. Many scholars forget, it seems to me, that our
enjoyment of the great works of literature depends more upon the
depth of our sympathy than upon our understanding. The trouble is
that very few of their laborious explanations stick in the
memory. The mind drops them as a branch drops its overripe fruit.
It is possible to know a flower, root and stem and all, and all
the processes of growth, and yet to have no appreciation of the
flower fresh bathed in heaven's dew. Again and again I ask
impatiently, "Why concern myself with these explanations and
hypotheses?" They fly hither and thither in my thought like blind
birds beating the air with ineffectual wings. I do not mean to
object to a thorough knowledge of the famous works we read. I
object only to the interminable comments and bewildering
criticisms that teach but one thing: there are as many opinions
as there are men. But when a great scholar like Professor
Kittredge interprets what the master said, it is "as if new sight
were given the blind." He brings back Shakespeare, the poet.

There are, however, times when I long to sweep away half the
things I am expected to learn; for the overtaxed mind cannot
enjoy the treasure it has secured at the greatest cost. It is
impossible, I think, to read in one day four or five different
books in different languages and treating of widely different
subjects, and not lose sight of the very ends for which one
reads. When one reads hurriedly and nervously, having in mind
written tests and examinations, one's brain becomes encumbered
with a lot of choice bric-a-brac for which there seems to be
little use. At the present time my mind is so full of
heterogeneous matter that I almost despair of ever being able to
put it in order. Whenever I enter the region that was the kingdom
of my mind I feel like the proverbial bull in the china shop. A
thousand odds and ends of knowledge come crashing about my head
like hailstones, and when I try to escape them, theme-goblins and
college nixies of all sorts pursue me, until I wish--oh, may I be
forgiven the wicked wish!--that I might smash the idols I came to
worship.

But the examinations are the chief bugbears of my college life.
Although I have faced them many times and cast them down and made
them bite the dust, yet they rise again and menace me with pale
looks, until like Bob Acres I feel my courage oozing out at my
finger ends. The days before these ordeals take place are spent
in cramming your mind with mystic formula and indigestible
dates--unpalatable diets, until you wish that books and science
and you were buried in the depths of the sea.

At last the dreaded hour arrives, and you are a favoured being
indeed if you feel prepared, and are able at the right time to
call to your standard thoughts that will aid you in that supreme
effort. It happens too often that your trumpet call is unheeded.
It is most perplexing and exasperating that just at the moment
when you need your memory and a nice sense of discrimination,
these faculties take to themselves wings and fly away. The facts
you have garnered with such infinite trouble invariably fail you
at a pinch.

"Give a brief account of Huss and his work." Huss? Who was he and
what did he do? The name looks strangely familiar. You ransack
your budget of historic facts much as you would hunt for a bit of
silk in a rag-bag. You are sure it is somewhere in your mind near
the top--you saw it there the other day when you were looking up
the beginnings of the Reformation. But where is it now? You fish
out all manner of odds and ends of knowledge--revolutions,
schisms, massacres, systems of government; but Huss--where is he?
You are amazed at all the things you know which are not on the
examination paper. In desperation you seize the budget and dump
everything out, and there in a corner is your man, serenely
brooding on his own private thought, unconscious of the
catastrophe which he has brought upon you.

Just then the proctor informs you that the time is up. With a
feeling of intense disgust you kick the mass of rubbish into a
corner and go home, your head full of revolutionary schemes to
abolish the divine right of professors to ask questions without
the consent of the questioned.

It comes over me that in the last two or three pages of this
chapter I have used figures which will turn the laugh against me.
Ah, here they are--the mixed metaphors mocking and strutting
about before me, pointing to the bull in the china shop assailed
by hailstones and the bugbears with pale looks, an unanalyzed
species! Let them mock on. The words describe so exactly the
atmosphere of jostling, tumbling ideas I live in that I will wink
at them for once, and put on a deliberate air to say that my
ideas of college have changed.

While my days at Radcliffe were still in the future, they were
encircled with a halo of romance, which they have lost; but in
the transition from romantic to actual I have learned many things
I should never have known had I not tried the experiment. One of
them is the precious science of patience, which teaches us that
we should take our education as we would take a walk in the
country, leisurely, our minds hospitably open to impressions of
every sort. Such knowledge floods the soul unseen with a
soundless tidal wave of deepening thought. "Knowledge is power."
Rather, knowledge is happiness, because to have knowledge--broad,
deep knowledge--is to know true ends from false, and lofty things
from low. To know the thoughts and deeds that have marked man's
progress is to feel the great heart-throbs of humanity through
the centuries; and if one does not feel in these pulsations a
heavenward striving, one must indeed be deaf to the harmonies of
life.



Chapter XXI

I have thus far sketched the events of my life, but I have not
shown how much I have depended on books not only for pleasure and
for the wisdom they bring to all who read, but also for that
knowledge which comes to others through their eyes and their
ears. Indeed, books have meant so much more in my education than
in that of others, that I shall go back to the time when I began
to read.

I read my first connected story in May, 1887, when I was seven
years old, and from that day to this I have devoured everything
in the shape of a printed page that has come within the reach of
my hungry finger tips. As I have said, I did not study regularly
during the early years of my education; nor did I read according
to rule.

At first I had only a few books in raised print--"readers" for
beginners, a collection of stories for children, and a book about
the earth called "Our World." I think that was all; but I read
them over and over, until the words were so worn and pressed I
could scarcely make them out. Sometimes Miss Sullivan read to me,
spelling into my hand little stories and poems that she knew I
should understand; but I preferred reading myself to being read
to, because I liked to read again and again the things that
pleased me.

It was during my first visit to Boston that I really began to
read in good earnest. I was permitted to spend a part of each day
in the Institution library, and to wander from bookcase to
bookcase, and take down whatever book my fingers lighted upon.
And read I did, whether I understood one word in ten or two words
on a page. The words themselves fascinated me; but I took no
conscious account of what I read. My mind must, however, have
been very impressionable at that period, for it retained many
words and whole sentences, to the meaning of which I had not the
faintest clue; and afterward, when I began to talk and write,
these words and sentences would flash out quite naturally, so
that my friends wondered at the richness of my vocabulary. I must
have read parts of many books (in those early days I think I
never read any one book through) and a great deal of poetry in
this uncomprehending way, until I discovered "Little Lord
Fauntleroy," which was the first book of any consequence I read
understandingly.

One day my teacher found me in a corner of the library poring
over the pages of "The Scarlet Letter." I was then about eight
years old. I remember she asked me if I liked little Pearl, and
explained some of the words that had puzzled me. Then she told me
that she had a beautiful story about a little boy which she was
sure I should like better than "The Scarlet Letter." The name of
the story was "Little Lord Fauntleroy," and she promised to read
it to me the following summer. But we did not begin the story
until August; the first few weeks of my stay at the seashore were
so full of discoveries and excitement that I forgot the very
existence of books. Then my teacher went to visit some friends in
Boston, leaving me for a short time.

When she returned almost the first thing we did was to begin the
story of "Little Lord Fauntleroy." I recall distinctly the time
and place when we read the first chapters of the fascinating
child's story. It was a warm afternoon in August. We were sitting
together in a hammock which swung from two solemn pines at a
short distance from the house. We had hurried through the
dish-washing after luncheon, in order that we might have as long
an afternoon as possible for the story. As we hastened through
the long grass toward the hammock, the grasshoppers swarmed about
us and fastened themselves on our clothes, and I remember that my
teacher insisted upon picking them all off before we sat down,
which seemed to me an unnecessary waste of time. The hammock was
covered with pine needles, for it had not been used while my
teacher was away. The warm sun shone on the pine trees and drew
out all their fragrance. The air was balmy, with a tang of the
sea in it. Before we began the story Miss Sullivan explained to
me the things that she knew I should not understand, and as we
read on she explained the unfamiliar words. At first there were
many words I did not know, and the reading was constantly
interrupted; but as soon as I thoroughly comprehended the
situation, I became too eagerly absorbed in the story to notice
mere words, and I am afraid I listened impatiently to the
explanations that Miss Sullivan felt to be necessary. When her
fingers were too tired to spell another word, I had for the first
time a keen sense of my deprivations. I took the book in my hands
and tried to feel the letters with an intensity of longing that I
can never forget.

Afterward, at my eager request, Mr. Anagnos had this story
embossed, and I read it again and again, until I almost knew it
by heart; and all through my childhood "Little Lord Fauntleroy"
was my sweet and gentle companion. I have given these details at
the risk of being tedious, because they are in such vivid
contrast with my vague, mutable and confused memories of earlier
reading.

From "Little Lord Fauntleroy" I date the beginning of my true
interest in books. During the next two years I read many books at
my home and on my visits to Boston. I cannot remember what they
all were, or in what order I read them; but I know that among
them were "Greek Heroes," La Fontaine's "Fables," Hawthorne's
"Wonder Book," "Bible Stories," Lamb's "Tales from Shakespeare,"
"A Child's History of England" by Dickens, "The Arabian Nights,"
"The Swiss Family Robinson," "The Pilgrim's Progress," "Robinson
Crusoe," "Little Women," and "Heidi," a beautiful little story
which I afterward read in German. I read them in the intervals
between study and play with an ever-deepening sense of pleasure.
I did not study nor analyze them--I did not know whether they
were well written or not; I never thought about style or
authorship. They laid their treasures at my feet, and I accepted
them as we accept the sunshine and the love of our friends. I
loved "Little Women" because it gave me a sense of kinship with
girls and boys who could see and hear. Circumscribed as my life
was in so many ways, I had to look between the covers of books
for news of the world that lay outside my own.

I did not care especially for "The Pilgrim's Progress," which I
think I did not finish, or for the "Fables." I read La Fontaine's
"Fables" first in an English translation, and enjoyed them only
after a half-hearted fashion. Later I read the book again in
French, and I found that, in spite of the vivid word-pictures,
and the wonderful mastery of language, I liked it no better. I do
not know why it is, but stories in which animals are made to talk
and act like human beings have never appealed to me very
strongly. The ludicrous caricatures of the animals occupy my mind
to the exclusion of the moral.

Then, again, La Fontaine seldom, if ever, appeals to our highest
moral sense. The highest chords he strikes are those of reason
and self-love. Through all the fables runs the thought that man's
morality springs wholly from self-love, and that if that
self-love is directed and restrained by reason, happiness must
follow. Now, so far as I can judge, self-love is the root of all
evil; but, of course, I may be wrong, for La Fontaine had greater
opportunities of observing men than I am likely ever to have. I
do not object so much to the cynical and satirical fables as to
those in which momentous truths are taught by monkeys and foxes.

But I love "The Jungle Book" and "Wild Animals I Have Known." I
feel a genuine interest in the animals themselves, because they
are real animals and not caricatures of men. One sympathizes with
their loves and hatreds, laughs over their comedies, and weeps
over their tragedies. And if they point a moral, it is so subtle
that we are not conscious of it.

My mind opened naturally and joyously to a conception of
antiquity. Greece, ancient Greece, exercised a mysterious
fascination over me. In my fancy the pagan gods and goddesses
still walked on earth and talked face to face with men, and in my
heart I secretly built shrines to those I loved best. I knew and
loved the whole tribe of nymphs and heroes and demigods--no, not
quite all, for the cruelty and greed of Medea and Jason were too
monstrous to be forgiven, and I used to wonder why the gods
permitted them to do wrong and then punished them for their
wickedness. And the mystery is still unsolved. I often wonder how

God can dumbness keep
While Sin creeps grinning through His house of Time.

It was the Iliad that made Greece my paradise. I was familiar
with the story of Troy before I read it in the original, and
consequently I had little difficulty in making the Greek words
surrender their treasures after I had passed the borderland of
grammar. Great poetry, whether written in Greek or in English,
needs no other interpreter than a responsive heart. Would that
the host of those who make the great works of the poets odious by
their analysis, impositions and laborious comments might learn
this simple truth! It is not necessary that one should be able to
define every word and give it its principal parts and its
grammatical position in the sentence in order to understand and
appreciate a fine poem. I know my learned professors have found
greater riches in the Iliad than I shall ever find; but I am not
avaricious. I am content that others should be wiser than I. But
with all their wide and comprehensive knowledge, they cannot
measure their enjoyment of that splendid epic, nor can I. When I
read the finest passages of the Iliad, I am conscious of a
soul-sense that lifts me above the narrow, cramping circumstances
of my life. My physical limitations are forgotten--my world lies
upward, the length and the breadth and the sweep of the heavens
are mine!

My admiration for the Aeneid is not so great, but it is none the
less real. I read it as much as possible without the help of
notes or dictionary, and I always like to translate the episodes
that please me especially. The word-painting of Virgil is
wonderful sometimes; but his gods and men move through the scenes
of passion and strife and pity and love like the graceful figures
in an Elizabethan mask, whereas in the Iliad they give three
leaps and go on singing. Virgil is serene and lovely like a
marble Apollo in the moonlight; Homer is a beautiful, animated
youth in the full sunlight with the wind in his hair.

How easy it is to fly on paper wings! From "Greek Heroes" to the
Iliad was no day's journey, nor was it altogether pleasant. One
could have traveled round the word many times while I trudged my
weary way through the labyrinthine mazes of grammars and
dictionaries, or fell into those dreadful pitfalls called
examinations, set by schools and colleges for the confusion of
those who seek after knowledge. I suppose this sort of Pilgrim's
Progress was justified by the end; but it seemed interminable to
me, in spite of the pleasant surprises that met me now and then
at a turn in the road.

I began to read the Bible long before I could understand it. Now
it seems strange to me that there should have been a time when my
spirit was deaf to its wondrous harmonies; but I remember well a
rainy Sunday morning when, having nothing else to do, I begged my
cousin to read me a story out of the Bible. Although she did not
think I should understand, she began to spell into my hand the
story of Joseph and his brothers. Somehow it failed to interest
me. The unusual language and repetition made the story seem
unreal and far away in the land of Canaan, and I fell asleep and
wandered off to the land of Nod, before the brothers came with
the coat of many colours unto the tent of Jacob and told their
wicked lie! I cannot understand why the stories of the Greeks
should have been so full of charm for me, and those of the Bible
so devoid of interest, unless it was that I had made the
acquaintance of several Greeks in Boston and been inspired by
their enthusiasm for the stories of their country; whereas I had
not met a single Hebrew or Egyptian, and therefore concluded that
they were nothing more than barbarians, and the stories about
them were probably all made up, which hypothesis explained the
repetitions and the queer names. Curiously enough, it never
occurred to me to call Greek patronymics "queer."

But how shall I speak of the glories I have since discovered in
the Bible? For years I have read it with an ever-broadening sense
of joy and inspiration; and I love it as I love no other book.
Still there is much in the Bible against which every instinct of
my being rebels, so much that I regret the necessity which has
compelled me to read it through from beginning to end. I do not
think that the knowledge which I have gained of its history and
sources compensates me for the unpleasant details it has forced
upon my attention. For my part, I wish, with Mr. Howells, that
the literature of the past might be purged of all that is ugly
and barbarous in it, although I should object as much as any one
to having these great works weakened or falsified.

There is something impressive, awful, in the simplicity and
terrible directness of the book of Esther. Could there be
anything more dramatic than the scene in which Esther stands
before her wicked lord? She knows her life is in his hands; there
is no one to protect her from his wrath. Yet, conquering her
woman's fear, she approaches him, animated by the noblest
patriotism, having but one thought: "If I perish, I perish; but
if I live, my people shall live."

The story of Ruth, too--how Oriental it is! Yet how different is
the life of these simple country folks from that of the Persian
capital! Ruth is so loyal and gentle-hearted, we cannot help
loving her, as she stands with the reapers amid the waving corn.
Her beautiful, unselfish spirit shines out like a bright star in
the night of a dark and cruel age. Love like Ruth's, love which
can rise above conflicting creeds and deep-seated racial
prejudices, is hard to find in all the world.

The Bible gives me a deep, comforting sense that "things seen are
temporal, and things unseen are eternal."

I do not remember a time since I have been capable of loving
books that I have not loved Shakespeare. I cannot tell exactly
when I began Lamb's "Tales from Shakespeare"; but I know that I
read them at first with a child's understanding and a child's
wonder. "Macbeth" seems to have impressed me most. One reading
was sufficient to stamp every detail of the story upon my memory
forever. For a long time the ghosts and witches pursued me even
into Dreamland. I could see, absolutely see, the dagger and Lady
Macbeth's little white hand--the dreadful stain was as real to me
as to the grief-stricken queen.

I read "King Lear" soon after "Macbeth," and I shall never forget
the feeling of horror when I came to the scene in which Gloster's
eyes are put out. Anger seized me, my fingers refused to move, I
sat rigid for one long moment, the blood throbbing in my temples,
and all the hatred that a child can feel concentrated in my
heart.

I must have made the acquaintance of Shylock and Satan about the
same time, for the two characters were long associated in my
mind. I remember that I was sorry for them. I felt vaguely that
they could not be good even if they wished to, because no one
seemed willing to help them or to give them a fair chance. Even
now I cannot find it in my heart to condemn them utterly. There
are moments when I feel that the Shylocks, the Judases, and even
the Devil, are broken spokes in the great wheel of good which
shall in due time be made whole.

It seems strange that my first reading of Shakespeare should have
left me so many unpleasant memories. The bright, gentle, fanciful
plays--the ones I like best now--appear not to have impressed me
at first, perhaps because they reflected the habitual sunshine
and gaiety of a child's life. But "there is nothing more
capricious than the memory of a child: what it will hold, and
what it will lose."

I have since read Shakespeare's plays many times and know parts
of them by heart, but I cannot tell which of them I like best. My
delight in them is as varied as my moods. The little songs and
the sonnets have a meaning for me as fresh and wonderful as the
dramas. But, with all my love for Shakespeare, it is often weary
work to read all the meanings into his lines which critics and
commentators have given them. I used to try to remember their
interpretations, but they discouraged and vexed me; so I made a
secret compact with myself not to try any more. This compact I
have only just broken in my study of Shakespeare under Professor
Kittredge. I know there are many things in Shakespeare, and in
the world, that I do not understand; and I am glad to see veil
after veil lift gradually, revealing new realms of thought and
beauty.

Next to poetry I love history. I have read every historical work
that I have been able to lay my hands on, from a catalogue of dry
facts and dryer dates to Green's impartial, picturesque "History
of the English People"; from Freeman's "History of Europe" to
Emerton's "Middle Ages." The first book that gave me any real
sense of the value of history was Swinton's "World History,"
which I received on my thirteenth birthday. Though I believe it
is no longer considered valid, yet I have kept it ever since as
one of my treasures. From it I learned how the races of men
spread from land to land and built great cities, how a few great
rulers, earthly Titans, put everything under their feet, and with
a decisive word opened the gates of happiness for millions and
closed them upon millions more: how different nations pioneered
in art and knowledge and broke ground for the mightier growths of
coming ages; how civilization underwent as it were, the holocaust
of a degenerate age, and rose again, like the Phoenix, among the
nobler sons of the North; and how by liberty, tolerance and
education the great and the wise have opened the way for the
salvation of the whole world.

In my college reading I have become somewhat familiar with French
and German literature. The German puts strength before beauty,
and truth before convention, both in life and in literature.
There is a vehement, sledge-hammer vigour about everything that
he does. When he speaks, it is not to impress others, but because
his heart would burst if he did not find an outlet for the
thoughts that burn in his soul.

Then, too, there is in German literature a fine reserve which I
like; but its chief glory is the recognition I find in it of the
redeeming potency of woman's self-sacrificing love. This thought
pervades all German literature and is mystically expressed in
Goethe's "Faust":

All things transitory
But as symbols are sent.
Earth's insufficiency
Here grows to event.
The indescribable
Here it is done.
The Woman Soul leads us upward and on!

Of all the French writers that I have read, I like Moliere and
Racine best. There are fine things in Balzac and passages in
Merimee which strike one like a keen blast of sea air. Alfred de
Musset is impossible! I admire Victor Hugo--I appreciate his
genius, his brilliancy, his romanticism; though he is not one of
my literary passions. But Hugo and Goethe and Schiller and all
great poets of all great nations are interpreters of eternal
things, and my spirit reverently follows them into the regions
where Beauty and Truth and Goodness are one.

I am afraid I have written too much about my book-friends, and
yet I have mentioned only the authors I love most; and from this
fact one might easily suppose that my circle of friends was very
limited and undemocratic, which would be a very wrong impression.
I like many writers for many reasons--Carlyle for his ruggedness
and scorn of shams; Wordsworth, who teaches the oneness of man
and nature; I find an exquisite pleasure in the oddities and
surprises of Hood, in Herrick's quaintness and the palpable scent
of lily and rose in his verses; I like Whittier for his
enthusiasms and moral rectitude. I knew him, and the gentle
remembrance of our friendship doubles the pleasure I have in
reading his poems. I love Mark Twain--who does not? The gods,
too, loved him and put into his heart all manner of wisdom; then,
fearing lest he should become a pessimist, they spanned his mind
with a rainbow of love and faith. I like Scott for his freshness,
dash and large honesty. I love all writers whose minds, like
Lowell's, bubble up in the sunshine of optimism--fountains of joy
and good will, with occasionally a splash of anger and here and
there a healing spray of sympathy and pity.

In a word, literature is my Utopia. Here I am not disfranchised.
No barrier of the senses shuts me out from the sweet, gracious
discourse of my book-friends. They talk to me without
embarrassment or awkwardness. The things I have learned and the
things I have been taught seem of ridiculously little importance
compared with their "large loves and heavenly charities."



Chapter XXII

I trust that my readers have not concluded from the preceding
chapter on books that reading is my only pleasure; my pleasures
and amusements are many and varied.

More than once in the course of my story I have referred to my
love of the country and out-of-door sports. When I was quite a
little girl, I learned to row and swim, and during the summer,
when I am at Wrentham, Massachusetts, I almost live in my boat.
Nothing gives me greater pleasure than to take my friends out
rowing when they visit me. Of course, I cannot guide the boat
very well. Some one usually sits in the stern and manages the
rudder while I row. Sometimes, however, I go rowing without the
rudder. It is fun to try to steer by the scent of watergrasses
and lilies, and of bushes that grow on the shore. I use oars with
leather bands, which keep them in position in the oarlocks, and I
know by the resistance of the water when the oars are evenly
poised. In the same manner I can also tell when I am pulling
against the current. I like to contend with wind and wave. What
is more exhilarating than to make your staunch little boat,
obedient to your will and muscle, go skimming lightly over
glistening, tilting waves, and to feel the steady, imperious
surge of the water!

I also enjoy canoeing, and I suppose you will smile when I say
that I especially like it on moonlight nights. I cannot, it is
true, see the moon climb up the sky behind the pines and steal
softly across the heavens, making a shining path for us to
follow; but I know she is there, and as I lie back among the
pillows and put my hand in the water, I fancy that I feel the
shimmer of her garments as she passes. Sometimes a daring little
fish slips between my fingers, and often a pond-lily presses
shyly against my hand. Frequently, as we emerge from the shelter
of a cove or inlet, I am suddenly conscious of the spaciousness
of the air about me. A luminous warmth seems to enfold me.
Whether it comes from the trees which have been heated by the
sun, or from the water, I can never discover. I have had the same
strange sensation even in the heart of the city. I have felt it
on cold, stormy days and at night. It is like the kiss of warm
lips on my face.

My favourite amusement is sailing. In the summer of 1901 I
visited Nova Scotia, and had opportunities such as I had not
enjoyed before to make the acquaintance of the ocean. After
spending a few days in Evangeline's country, about which
Longfellow's beautiful poem has woven a spell of enchantment,
Miss Sullivan and I went to Halifax, where we remained the
greater part of the summer. The harbour was our joy, our
paradise. What glorious sails we had to Bedford Basin, to
McNabb's Island, to York Redoubt, and to the Northwest Arm! And
at night what soothing, wondrous hours we spent in the shadow of
the great, silent men-of-war. Oh, it was all so interesting, so
beautiful! The memory of it is a joy forever.

One day we had a thrilling experience. There was a regatta in the
Northwest Arm, in which the boats from the different warships
were engaged. We went in a sail-boat along with many others to
watch the races. Hundreds of little sail-boats swung to and fro
close by, and the sea was calm. When the races were over, and we
turned our faces homeward, one of the party noticed a black cloud
drifting in from the sea, which grew and spread and thickened
until it covered the whole sky. The wind rose, and the waves
chopped angrily at unseen barriers. Our little boat confronted
the gale fearlessly; with sails spread and ropes taut, she seemed
to sit upon the wind. Now she swirled in the billows, now she
spring upward on a gigantic wave, only to be driven down with
angry howl and hiss. Down came the mainsail. Tacking and jibbing,
we wrestled with opposing winds that drove us from side to side
with impetuous fury. Our hearts beat fast, and our hands trembled
with excitement, not fear, for we had the hearts of vikings, and
we knew that our skipper was master of the situation. He had
steered through many a storm with firm hand and sea-wise eye. As
they passed us, the large craft and the gunboats in the harbour
saluted and the seamen shouted applause for the master of the
only little sail-boat that ventured out into the storm. At last,
cold, hungry and weary, we reached our pier.

Last summer I spent in one of the loveliest nooks of one of the
most charming villages in New England. Wrentham, Massachusetts,
is associated with nearly all of my joys and sorrows. For many
years Red Farm, by King Philip's Pond, the home of Mr. J. E.
Chamberlin and his family, was my home. I remember with deepest
gratitude the kindness of these dear friends and the happy days I
spent with them. The sweet companionship of their children meant
much to me. I joined in all their sports and rambles through the
woods and frolics in the water. The prattle of the little ones
and their pleasure in the stories I told them of elf and gnome,
of hero and wily bear, are pleasant things to remember. Mr.
Chamberlin initiated me into the mysteries of tree and
wild-flower, until with the little ear of love I heard the flow
of sap in the oak, and saw the sun glint from leaf to leaf. Thus
it is that

Even as the roots, shut in the darksome earth,
Share in the tree-top's joyance, and conceive
Of sunshine and wide air and winged things,
By sympathy of nature, so do I

gave evidence of things unseen.

It seems to me that there is in each of us a capacity to
comprehend the impressions and emotions which have been
experienced by mankind from the beginning. Each individual has a
subconscious memory of the green earth and murmuring waters, and
blindness and deafness cannot rob him of this gift from past
generations. This inherited capacity is a sort of sixth sense--a
soul-sense which sees, hears, feels, all in one.

I have many tree friends in Wrentham. One of them, a splendid
oak, is the special pride of my heart. I take all my other
friends to see this king-tree. It stands on a bluff overlooking
King Philip's Pond, and those who are wise in tree lore say it
must have stood there eight hundred or a thousand years. There is
a tradition that under this tree King Philip, the heroic Indian
chief, gazed his last on earth and sky.

I had another tree friend, gentle and more approachable than the
great oak--a linden that grew in the dooryard at Red Farm. One
afternoon, during a terrible thunderstorm, I felt a tremendous
crash against the side of the house and knew, even before they
told me, that the linden had fallen. We went out to see the hero
that had withstood so many tempests, and it wrung my heart to see
him prostrate who had mightily striven and was now mightily
fallen.

But I must not forget that I was going to write about last summer
in particular. As soon as my examinations were over, Miss
Sullivan and I hastened to this green nook, where we have a
little cottage on one of the three lakes for which Wrentham is
famous. Here the long, sunny days were mine, and all thoughts of
work and college and the noisy city were thrust into the
background. In Wrentham we caught echoes of what was happening in
the world--war, alliance, social conflict. We heard of the cruel,
unnecessary fighting in the far-away Pacific, and learned of the
struggles going on between capital and labour. We knew that
beyond the border of our Eden men were making history by the
sweat of their brows when they might better make a holiday. But
we little heeded these things. These things would pass away; here
were lakes and woods and broad daisy-starred fields and
sweet-breathed meadows, and they shall endure forever.

People who think that all sensations reach us through the eye and
the ear have expressed surprise that I should notice any
difference, except possibly the absence of pavements, between
walking in city streets and in country roads. They forget that my
whole body is alive to the conditions about me. The rumble and
roar of the city smite the nerves of my face, and I feel the
ceaseless tramp of an unseen multitude, and the dissonant tumult
frets my spirit. The grinding of heavy wagons on hard pavements
and the monotonous clangour of machinery are all the more
torturing to the nerves if one's attention is not diverted by the
panorama that is always present in the noisy streets to people
who can see.

In the country one sees only Nature's fair works, and one's soul
is not saddened by the cruel struggle for mere existence that
goes on in the crowded city. Several times I have visited the
narrow, dirty streets where the poor live, and I grow hot and
indignant to think that good people should be content to live in
fine houses and become strong and beautiful, while others are
condemned to live in hideous, sunless tenements and grow ugly,
withered and cringing. The children who crowd these grimy alleys,
half-clad and underfed, shrink away from your outstretched hand
as if from a blow. Dear little creatures, they crouch in my heart
and haunt me with a constant sense of pain. There are men and
women, too, all gnarled and bent out of shape. I have felt their
hard, rough hands and realized what an endless struggle their
existence must be--no more than a series of scrimmages, thwarted
attempts to do something. Their life seems an immense disparity
between effort and opportunity. The sun and the air are God's
free gifts to all we say, but are they so? In yonder city's dingy
alleys the sun shines not, and the air is foul. Oh, man, how dost
thou forget and obstruct thy brother man, and say, "Give us this
day our daily bread," when he has none! Oh, would that men would
leave the city, its splendour and its tumult and its gold, and
return to wood and field and simple, honest living! Then would
their children grow stately as noble trees, and their thoughts
sweet and pure as wayside flowers. It is impossible not to think
of all this when I return to the country after a year of work in
town.

What a joy it is to feel the soft, springy earth under my feet
once more, to follow grassy roads that lead to ferny brooks where
I can bathe my fingers in a cataract of rippling notes, or to
clamber over a stone wall into green fields that tumble and roll
and climb in riotous gladness!

Next to a leisurely walk I enjoy a "spin" on my tandem bicycle.
It is splendid to feel the wind blowing in my face and the
springy motion of my iron steed. The rapid rush through the air
gives me a delicious sense of strength and buoyancy, and the
exercise makes my pulses dance and my heart sing.

Whenever it is possible, my dog accompanies me on a walk or ride
or sail. I have had many dog friends--huge mastiffs, soft-eyed
spaniels, wood-wise setters and honest, homely bull terriers. At
present the lord of my affections is one of these bull terriers.
He has a long pedigree, a crooked tail and the drollest "phiz" in
dogdom. My dog friends seem to understand my limitations, and
always keep close beside me when I am alone. I love their
affectionate ways and the eloquent wag of their tails.

When a rainy day keeps me indoors, I amuse myself after the
manner of other girls. I like to knit and crochet; I read in the
happy-go-lucky way I love, here and there a line; or perhaps I
play a game or two of checkers or chess with a friend. I have a
special board on which I play these games. The squares are cut
out, so that the men stand in them firmly. The black checkers are
flat and the white ones curved on top. Each checker has a hole in
the middle in which a brass knob can be placed to distinguish the
king from the commons. The chessmen are of two sizes, the white
larger than the black, so that I have no trouble in following my
opponent's maneuvers by moving my hands lightly over the board
after a play. The jar made by shifting the men from one hole to
another tells me when it is my turn.

If I happen to be all alone and in an idle mood, I play a game of
solitaire, of which I am very fond. I use playing cards marked in
the upper right-hand corner with braille symbols which indicate
the value of the card.

If there are children around, nothing pleases me so much as to
frolic with them. I find even the smallest child excellent
company, and I am glad to say that children usually like me. They
lead me about and show me the things they are interested in. Of
course the little ones cannot spell on their fingers; but I
manage to read their lips. If I do not succeed they resort to
dumb show. Sometimes I make a mistake and do the wrong thing. A
burst of childish laughter greets my blunder, and the pantomime
begins all over again. I often tell them stories or teach them a
game, and the winged hours depart and leave us good and happy.

Museums and art stores are also sources of pleasure and
inspiration. Doubtless it will seem strange to many that the hand
unaided by sight can feel action, sentiment, beauty in the cold
marble; and yet it is true that I derive genuine pleasure from
touching great works of art. As my finger tips trace line and
curve, they discover the thought and emotion which the artist has
portrayed. I can feel in the faces of gods and heroes hate,
courage and love, just as I can detect them in living faces I am
permitted to touch. I feel in Diana's posture the grace and
freedom of the forest and the spirit that tames the mountain lion
and subdues the fiercest passions. My soul delights in the repose
and gracious curves of the Venus; and in Barre's bronzes the
secrets of the jungle are revealed to me.

A medallion of Homer hangs on the wall of my study, conveniently
low, so that I can easily reach it and touch the beautiful, sad
face with loving reverence. How well I know each line in that
majestic brow--tracks of life and bitter evidences of struggle
and sorrow; those sightless eyes seeking, even in the cold
plaster, for the light and the blue skies of his beloved Hellas,
but seeking in vain; that beautiful mouth, firm and true and
tender. It is the face of a poet, and of a man acquainted with
sorrow. Ah, how well I understand his deprivation--the perpetual
night in which he dwelt--

O dark, dark, amid the blaze of noon,
Irrecoverably dark, total eclipse
Without all hope of day!

In imagination I can hear Homer singing, as with unsteady,
hesitating steps he gropes his way from camp to camp--singing of
life, of love, of war, of the splendid achievements of a noble
race. It was a wonderful, glorious song, and it won the blind
poet an immortal crown, the admiration of all ages.

I sometimes wonder if the hand is not more sensitive to the
beauties of sculpture than the eye. I should think the wonderful
rhythmical flow of lines and curves could be more subtly felt
than seen. Be this as it may, I know that I can feel the
heart-throbs of the ancient Greeks in their marble gods and
goddesses.

Another pleasure, which comes more rarely than the others, is
going to the theatre. I enjoy having a play described to me while
it is being acted on the stage far more than reading it, because
then it seems as if I were living in the midst of stirring
events. It has been my privilege to meet a few great actors and
actresses who have the power of so bewitching you that you forget
time and place and live again in the romantic past. I have been
permitted to touch the face and costume of Miss Ellen Terry as
she impersonated our ideal of a queen; and there was about her
that divinity that hedges sublimest woe. Beside her stood Sir
Henry Irving, wearing the symbols of kingship; and there was
majesty of intellect in his every gesture and attitude and the
royalty that subdues and overcomes in every line of his sensitive
face. In the king's face, which he wore as a mask, there was a
remoteness and inaccessibility of grief which I shall never
forget.

I also know Mr. Jefferson. I am proud to count him among my
friends. I go to see him whenever I happen to be where he is
acting. The first time I saw him act was while at school in New
York. He played "Rip Van Winkle." I had often read the story, but
I had never felt the charm of Rip's slow, quaint, kind ways as I
did in the play. Mr. Jefferson's, beautiful, pathetic
representation quite carried me away with delight. I have a
picture of old Rip in my fingers which they will never lose.
After the play Miss Sullivan took me to see him behind the
scenes, and I felt of his curious garb and his flowing hair and
beard. Mr. Jefferson let me touch his face so that I could
imagine how he looked on waking from that strange sleep of twenty
years, and he showed me how poor old Rip staggered to his feet.

I have also seen him in "The Rivals." Once while I was calling on
him in Boston he acted the most striking parts of "The Rivals"
for me. The reception-room where we sat served for a stage. He
and his son seated themselves at the big table, and Bob Acres
wrote his challenge. I followed all his movements with my hands,
and caught the drollery of his blunders and gestures in a way
that would have been impossible had it all been spelled to me.
Then they rose to fight the duel, and I followed the swift
thrusts and parries of the swords and the waverings of poor Bob
as his courage oozed out at his finger ends. Then the great actor
gave his coat a hitch and his mouth a twitch, and in an instant I
was in the village of Falling Water and felt Schneider's shaggy
head against my knee. Mr. Jefferson recited the best dialogues of
"Rip Van Winkle," in which the tear came close upon the smile. He
asked me to indicate as far as I could the gestures and action
that should go with the lines. Of course, I have no sense
whatever of dramatic action, and could make only random guesses;
but with masterful art he suited the action to the word. The sigh
of Rip as he murmurs, "Is a man so soon forgotten when he is
gone?" the dismay with which he searches for dog and gun after
his long sleep, and his comical irresolution over signing the
contract with Derrick--all these seem to be right out of life
itself; that is, the ideal life, where things happen as we think
they should.

I remember well the first time I went to the theatre. It was
twelve years ago. Elsie Leslie, the little actress, was in
Boston, and Miss Sullivan took me to see her in "The Prince and
the Pauper." I shall never forget the ripple of alternating joy
and woe that ran through that beautiful little play, or the
wonderful child who acted it. After the play I was permitted to
go behind the scenes and meet her in her royal costume. It would
have been hard to find a lovelier or more lovable child than
Elsie, as she stood with a cloud of golden hair floating over her
shoulders, smiling brightly, showing no signs of shyness or
fatigue, though she had been playing to an immense audience. I
was only just learning to speak, and had previously repeated her
name until I could say it perfectly. Imagine my delight when she
understood the few words I spoke to her and without hesitation
stretched her hand to greet me.

Is it not true, then, that my life with all its limitations
touches at many points the life of the World Beautiful?
Everything has its wonders, even darkness and silence, and I
learn, whatever state I may be in, therein to be content.

Sometimes, it is true, a sense of isolation enfolds me like a
cold mist as I sit alone and wait at life's shut gate. Beyond
there is light, and music, and sweet companionship; but I may not
enter. Fate, silent, pitiless, bars the way. Fain would I
question his imperious decree, for my heart is still
undisciplined and passionate; but my tongue will not utter the
bitter, futile words that rise to my lips, and they fall back
into my heart like unshed tears. Silence sits immense upon my
soul. Then comes hope with a smile and whispers, "There is joy in
self-forgetfulness." So I try to make the light in others' eyes
my sun, the music in others' ears my symphony, the smile on
others' lips my happiness.



Chapter XXIII

Would that I could enrich this sketch with the names of all those
who have ministered to my happiness! Some of them would be found
written in our literature and dear to the hearts of many, while
others would be wholly unknown to most of my readers. But their
influence, though it escapes fame, shall live immortal in the
lives that have been sweetened and ennobled by it. Those are
red-letter days in our lives when we meet people who thrill us
like a fine poem, people whose handshake is brimful of unspoken
sympathy, and whose sweet, rich natures impart to our eager,
impatient spirits a wonderful restfulness which, in its essence,
is divine. The perplexities, irritations and worries that have
absorbed us pass like unpleasant dreams, and we wake to see with
new eyes and hear with new ears the beauty and harmony of God's
real world. The solemn nothings that fill our everyday life
blossom suddenly into bright possibilities. In a word, while such
friends are near us we feel that all is well. Perhaps we never
saw them before, and they may never cross our life's path again;
but the influence of their calm, mellow natures is a libation
poured upon our discontent, and we feel its healing touch, as the
ocean feels the mountain stream freshening its brine.

I have often been asked, "Do not people bore you?" I do not
understand quite what that means. I suppose the calls of the
stupid and curious, especially of newspaper reporters, are always
inopportune. I also dislike people who try to talk down to my
understanding. They are like people who when walking with you try
to shorten their steps to suit yours; the hypocrisy in both cases
is equally exasperating.

The hands of those I meet are dumbly eloquent to me. The touch of
some hands is an impertinence. I have met people so empty of joy,
that when I clasped their frosty finger tips, it seemed as if I
were shaking hands with a northeast storm. Others there are whose
hands have sunbeams in them, so that their grasp warms my heart.
It may be only the clinging touch of a child's hand; but there is
as much potential sunshine in it for me as there is in a loving
glance for others. A hearty handshake or a friendly letter gives
me genuine pleasure.

I have many far-off friends whom I have never seen. Indeed they
are so many that I have often been unable to reply to their
letters; but I wish to say here that I am always grateful for
their kind words, however insufficiently I acknowledge them.

I count it one of the sweetest privileges of my life to have
known and conversed with many men of genius. Only those who knew
Bishop Brooks can appreciate the joy his friendship was to those
who possessed it. As a child I loved to sit on his knee and clasp
his great hand with one of mine, while Miss Sullivan spelled into
the other his beautiful words about God and the spiritual world.
I heard him with a child's wonder and delight. My spirit could
not reach up to his, but he gave me a real sense of joy in life,
and I never left him without carrying away a fine thought that
grew in beauty and depth of meaning as I grew. Once, when I was
puzzled to know why there were so many religions, he said: "There
is one universal religion, Helen--the religion of love. Love your
Heavenly Father with your whole heart and soul, love every child
of God as much as ever you can, and remember that the
possibilities of good are greater than the possibilities of evil;
and you have the key to Heaven." And his life was a happy
illustration of this great truth. In his noble soul love and
widest knowledge were blended with faith that had become insight.
He saw

God in all that liberates and lifts,
In all that humbles, sweetens and consoles.

Bishop Brooks taught me no special creed or dogma; but he
impressed upon my mind two great ideas--the fatherhood of God and
the brotherhood of man, and made me feel that these truths
underlie all creeds and forms of worship. God is love, God is our
Father, we are His children; therefore the darkest clouds will
break and though right be worsted, wrong shall not triumph.

I am too happy in this world to think much about the future,
except to remember that I have cherished friends awaiting me
there in God's beautiful Somewhere. In spite of the lapse of
years, they seem so close to me that I should not think it
strange if at any moment they should clasp my hand and speak
words of endearment as they used to before they went away.

Since Bishop Brooks died I have read the Bible through; also some
philosophical works on religion, among them Swedenborg's "Heaven
and Hell" and Drummond's "Ascent of Man," and I have found no
creed or system more soul-satisfying than Bishop Brooks's creed
of love. I knew Mr. Henry Drummond, and the memory of his strong,
warm hand-clasp is like a benediction. He was the most
sympathetic of companions. He knew so much and was so genial that
it was impossible to feel dull in his presence.

I remember well the first time I saw Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes.
He had invited Miss Sullivan and me to call on him one Sunday
afternoon. It was early in the spring, just after I had learned
to speak. We were shown at once to his library where we found him
seated in a big armchair by an open fire which glowed and
crackled on the hearth, thinking, he said, of other days.

"And listening to the murmur of the River Charles," I suggested.

"Yes," he replied, "the Charles has many dear associations for
me." There was an odour of print and leather in the room which
told me that it was full of books, and I stretched out my hand
instinctively to find them. My fingers lighted upon a beautiful
volume of Tennyson's poems, and when Miss Sullivan told me what
it was I began to recite:

Break, break, break
On thy cold gray stones, O sea!

But I stopped suddenly. I felt tears on my hand. I had made my
beloved poet weep, and I was greatly distressed. He made me sit
in his armchair, while he brought different interesting things
for me to examine, and at his request I recited "The Chambered
Nautilus," which was then my favorite poem. After that I saw Dr.
Holmes many times and learned to love the man as well as the
poet.

One beautiful summer day, not long after my meeting with Dr.
Holmes, Miss Sullivan and I visited Whittier in his quiet home on
the Merrimac. His gentle courtesy and quaint speech won my heart.
He had a book of his poems in raised print from which I read "In
School Days." He was delighted that I could pronounce the words
so well, and said that he had no difficulty in understanding me.
Then I asked many questions about the poem, and read his answers
by placing my fingers on his lips. He said he was the little boy
in the poem, and that the girl's name was Sally, and more which I
have forgotten. I also recited "Laus Deo," and as I spoke the
concluding verses, he placed in my hands a statue of a slave from
whose crouching figure the fetters were falling, even as they
fell from Peter's limbs when the angel led him forth out of
prison. Afterward we went into his study, and he wrote his
autograph for my teacher ["With great admiration of thy noble
work in releasing from bondage the mind of thy dear pupil, I am
truly thy friend. john J. Whittier."] and expressed his
admiration of her work, saying to me, "She is thy spiritual
liberator." Then he led me to the gate and kissed me tenderly on
my forehead. I promised to visit him again the following summer,
but he died before the promise was fulfilled.

Dr. Edward Everett Hale is one of my very oldest friends. I have
known him since I was eight, and my love for him has increased
with my years. His wise, tender sympathy has been the support of
Miss Sullivan and me in times of trial and sorrow, and his strong
hand has helped us over many rough places; and what he has done
for us he has done for thousands of those who have difficult
tasks to accomplish. He has filled the old skins of dogma with
the new wine of love, and shown men what it is to believe, live
and be free. What he has taught we have seen beautifully
expressed in his own life--love of country, kindness to the least
of his brethren, and a sincere desire to live upward and onward.
He has been a prophet and an inspirer of men, and a mighty doer
of the Word, the friend of all his race--God bless him!

I have already written of my first meeting with Dr. Alexander
Graham Bell. Since then I have spent many happy days with him at
Washington and at his beautiful home in the heart of Cape Breton
Island, near Baddeck, the village made famous by Charles Dudley
Warner's book. Here in Dr. Bell's laboratory, or in the fields on
the shore of the great Bras d'Or, I have spent many delightful
hours listening to what he had to tell me about his experiments,
and helping him fly kites by means of which he expects to
discover the laws that shall govern the future air-ship. Dr. Bell
is proficient in many fields of science, and has the art of
making every subject he touches interesting, even the most
abstruse theories. He makes you feel that if you only had a
little more time, you, too, might be an inventor. He has a
humorous and poetic side, too. His dominating passion is his love
for children. He is never quite so happy as when he has a little
deaf child in his arms. His labours in behalf of the deaf will
live on and bless generations of children yet to come; and we
love him alike for what he himself has achieved and for what he
has evoked from others.

During the two years I spent in New York I had many opportunities
to talk with distinguished people whose names I had often heard,
but whom I had never expected to meet. Most of them I met first
in the house of my good friend, Mr. Laurence Hutton. It was a
great privilege to visit him and dear Mrs. Hutton in their lovely
home, and see their library and read the beautiful sentiments and
bright thoughts gifted friends had written for them. It has been
truly said that Mr. Hutton has the faculty of bringing out in
every one the best thoughts and kindest sentiments. One does not
need to read "A Boy I Knew" to understand him--the most generous,
sweet-natured boy I ever knew, a good friend in all sorts of
weather, who traces the footprints of love in the life of dogs as
well as in that of his fellowmen.

Mrs. Hutton is a true and tried friend. Much that I hold
sweetest, much that I hold most precious, I owe to her. She has
oftenest advised and helped me in my progress through college.
When I find my work particularly difficult and discouraging, she
writes me letters that make me feel glad and brave; for she is
one of those from whom we learn that one painful duty fulfilled
makes the next plainer and easier.

Mr. Hutton introduced me to many of his literary friends,
greatest of whom are Mr. William Dean Howells and Mark Twain. I
also met Mr. Richard Watson Gilder and Mr. Edmund Clarence
Stedman. I also knew Mr. Charles Dudley Warner, the most
delightful of story-tellers and the most beloved friend, whose
sympathy was so broad that it may be truly said of him, he loved
all living things and his neighbour as himself. Once Mr. Warner
brought to see me the dear poet of the woodlands--Mr. John
Burroughs. They were all gentle and sympathetic and I felt the
charm of their manner as much as I had felt the brilliancy of
their essays and poems. I could not keep pace with all these
literary folk as they glanced from subject to subject and entered
into deep dispute, or made conversation sparkle with epigrams and
happy witticisms. I was like little Ascanius, who followed with
unequal steps the heroic strides of Aeneas on his march toward
mighty destinies. But they spoke many gracious words to me. Mr.
Gilder told me about his moonlight journeys across the vast
desert to the Pyramids, and in a letter he wrote me he made his
mark under his signature deep in the paper so that I could feel
it. This reminds me that Dr. Hale used to give a personal touch
to his letters to me by pricking his signature in braille. I read
from Mark Twain's lips one or two of his good stories. He has his
own way of thinking, saying and doing everything. I feel the
twinkle of his eye in his handshake. Even while he utters his
cynical wisdom in an indescribably droll voice, he makes you feel
that his heart is a tender Iliad of human sympathy.

There are a host of other interesting people I met in New York:
Mrs. Mary Mapes Dodge, the beloved editor of St. Nicholas, and
Mrs. Riggs (Kate Douglas Wiggin), the sweet author of "Patsy." I
received from them gifts that have the gentle concurrence of the
heart, books containing their own thoughts, soul-illumined
letters, and photographs that I love to have described again and
again. But there is not space to mention all my friends, and
indeed there are things about them hidden behind the wings of
cherubim, things too sacred to set forth in cold print. It is
with hesitancy that I have spoken even of Mrs. Laurence Hutton.

I shall mention only two other friends. One is Mrs. William Thaw,
of Pittsburgh, whom I have often visited in her home, Lyndhurst.
She is always doing something to make some one happy, and her
generosity and wise counsel have never failed my teacher and me
in all the years we have known her.

To the other friend I am also deeply indebted. He is well known
for the powerful hand with which he guides vast enterprises, and
his wonderful abilities have gained for him the respect of all.
Kind to every one, he goes about doing good, silent and unseen.
Again I touch upon the circle of honoured names I must not
mention; but I would fain acknowledge his generosity and
affectionate interest which make it possible for me to go to
college.

Thus it is that my friends have made the story of my life. In a
thousand ways they have turned my limitations into beautiful
privileges, and enabled me to walk serene and happy in the shadow
cast by my deprivation.



Part II. Letters(1887-1901)

INTRODUCTION

Helen Keller's letters are important, not only as a supplementary
story of her life, but as a demonstration of her growth in
thought and expression--the growth which in itself has made her
distinguished.

These letters are, however, not merely remarkable as the
productions of a deaf and blind girl, to be read with wonder and
curiosity; they are good letters almost from the first. The best
passages are those in which she talks about herself, and gives
her world in terms of her experience of it. Her views on the
precession of the equinoxes are not important, but most important
are her accounts of what speech meant to her, of how she felt the
statues, the dogs, the chickens at the poultry show, and how she
stood in the aisle of St. Bartholomew's and felt the organ
rumble. Those are passages of which one would ask for more. The
reason they are comparatively few is that all her life she has
been trying to be "like other people," and so she too often
describes things not as they appear to her, but as they appear to
one with eyes and ears.

One cause for the excellence of her letters is the great number
of them. They are the exercises which have trained her to write.
She has lived at different times in different parts of the
country, and so has been separated from most of her friends and
relatives. Of her friends, many have been distinguished people,
to whom--not often, I think, at the sacrifice of spontaneity--she
has felt it necessary to write well. To them and to a few friends
with whom she is in closest sympathy she writes with intimate
frankness whatever she is thinking about. Her naive retelling of
a child's tale she has heard, like the story of "Little Jakey,"
which she rehearses for Dr. Holmes and Bishop Brooks, is charming
and her grave paraphrase of the day's lesson in geography or
botany, her parrot-like repetition of what she has heard, and her
conscious display of new words, are delightful and instructive;
for they show not only what she was learning, but how, by putting
it all into letters, she made the new knowledge and the new words
her own.

So these selections from Miss Keller's correspondence are made
with two purposes--to show her development and to preserve the
most entertaining and significant passages from several hundred
letters. Many of those written before 1892 were published in the
reports of the Perkins Institution for the Blind. All letters up
to that year are printed intact, for it is legitimate to be
interested in the degree of skill the child showed in writing,
even to details of punctuation; so it is well to preserve a
literal integrity of reproduction. From the letters after the
year 1892 I have culled in the spirit of one making an anthology,
choosing the passages best in style and most important from the
point of view of biography. Where I have been able to collate the
original letters I have preserved everything as Miss Keller wrote
it, punctuation, spelling, and all. I have done nothing but
select and cut.

The letters are arranged in chronological order. One or two
letters from Bishop Brooks, Dr. Holmes, and Whittier are put
immediately after the letters to which they are replies. Except
for two or three important letters of 1901, these selections
cease with the year 1900. In that year Miss Keller entered
college. Now that she is a grown woman, her mature letters should
be judged like those of any other person, and it seems best that
no more of her correspondence be published unless she should
become distinguished beyond the fact that she is the only
well-educated deaf and blind person in the world.


LETTERS (1887-1901)

Miss Sullivan began to teach Helen Keller on March 3rd, 1887.
Three months and a half after the first word was spelled into her
hand, she wrote in pencil this letter

TO HER COUSIN ANNA, MRS. GEORGE T. TURNER
[Tuscumbia, Alabama, June 17, 1887.]

helen write anna george will give helen apple simpson will shoot
bird jack will give helen stick of candy doctor will give mildred
medicine mother will make mildred new dress
[No signature]


Twenty-five days later, while she was on a short visit away from
home, she wrote to her mother. Two words are almost illegible,
and the angular print slants in every direction.

TO MRS. KATE ADAMS KELLER
[Huntsville, Alabama, July 12, 1887.]

Helen will write mother letter papa did give helen medicine
mildred will sit in swing mildred did kiss helen teacher did give
helen peach george is sick in bed george arm is hurt anna did
give helen lemonade dog did stand up.

conductor did punch ticket papa did give helen drink of water in
car

carlotta did give helen flowers anna will buy helen pretty new
hat helen will hug and kiss mother helen will come home
grandmother does love helen

good-by
[No signature.]


By the following September Helen shows improvement in fulness of
construction and more extended relations of thought.

TO THE BLIND GIRLS AT THE PERKINS INSTITUTION IN SOUTH BOSTON
[Tuscumbia, September, 1887.]

Helen will write little blind girls a letter Helen and teacher
will come to see little blind girls Helen and teacher will go in
steam car to boston Helen and blind girls will have fun blind
girls can talk on fingers Helen will see Mr anagnos Mr anagnos
will love and kiss Helen Helen will go to school with blind girls
Helen can read and count and spell and write like blind girls
mildred will not go to boston Mildred does cry prince and jumbo
will go to boston papa does shoot ducks with gun and ducks do
fall in water and jumbo and mamie do swim in water and bring
ducks out in mouth to papa Helen does play with dogs Helen does
ride on horseback with teacher Helen does give handee grass in
hand teacher does whip handee to go fast Helen is blind Helen
will put letter in envelope for blind girls good-by
HELEN KELLER


A few weeks later her style is more nearly correct and freer in
movement. She improves in idiom, although she still omits
articles and uses the "did" construction for the simple past.
This is an idiom common among children.

TO THE BLIND GIRLS AT THE PERKINS INSTITUTION
[Tuscumbia, October 24, 1887.]

dear little blind girls

I will write you a letter I thank you for pretty desk I did write
to mother in memphis on it mother and mildred came home wednesday
mother brought me a pretty new dress and hat papa did go to
huntsville he brought me apples and candy I and teacher will come
to boston and see you nancy is my doll she does cry I do rock
nancy to sleep mildred is sick doctor will give her medicine to
make her well. I and teacher did go to church sunday mr. lane did
read in book and talk Lady did play organ. I did give man money
in basket. I will be good girl and teacher will curl my hair
lovely. I will hug and kiss little blind girls mr. anagnos will


 


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