Library Collections: Document: Full Text

As soon as Helen's mind burst forth from its triple incarceration, she began, like the eagle, to soar towards the sun. Since the restoration of her divine birthright of thought and human fellowship, her career has been a series of triumphs. In the course of four years she wrought great things and accomplished wonders. Her eagerness to pluck away the veil of ignorance that surrounded her, to enter the treasuries of nature and to become acquainted with the works of man and the causes of things, enabled her to acquire an immense fund of information, and to attain a quickness of apprehension and maturity of reflection seldom to be found in persons of her age. Her understanding is capable of conceiving the outer world and of painting in itself the invisible pictures of all objects.

Helen's mind is of the highest order. Its activity is unremitting and its grasp most powerful. It neither tires nor faints in its travels in the regions of thought and knowledge. Like a lark, it soars far above our heads in search of what is beyond the range of ordinary perceptions, and each heaven attained reveals to her a higher one.

Helen is of Emersonian temper in the intuitional quality of her mind. She leaps to conclusions with startling rapidity. Things come to her by true inspiration; that is, by inbreathing. Her intellectual framework is teeming with energy and alertness. Here all is motion, quickness, change. No one can appreciate a situation with finer and more delicate instinct or understand things more quickly than she does, catching up their meaning instantly, and expressing it with preëminent happiness of insight.

"Who can tell, when her ears were sealed,
What harmonies appeased her soul
With spirit's recompense for dole
Of happiness that senses may yield?"

Helen's mind, winged by emotion, goes forth and gathers honey from the bloom of creations. Of all the divers intellectual natures with which I have ever been brought into intercourse, hers is one of the most fecund. The domain of her knowledge is incredibly ample and varied. She has made elementary studies in natural history, cosmography, mythology, biography and English literature. Her stores of information are amazingly large. She may be fittingly called a little cyclopedia. She is always ready to discourse with fluency on plants and flowers, on animals and birds, on the blue sky and the heavenly bodies, on countries and cities, on mountains and rivers, on the Olympian gods and goddesses and the Greek heroes, on the landing of the Pilgrims and the battle of Lexington, on Leonidas and Washington, on Socrates and Emerson, on the Acropolis and the Capitoline hill, on Pompeii and Herculaneum, on Pheidias and Praxiteles, on Shakespeare and Byron, on Tennyson and Longfellow, on Andersen's tales and Miss Alcott's stories, on St. Peter's basilica and the cathedral of St. Mark, on Michael Angelo and Beethoven, and on innumerable other topics. Moreover, by constant exercise of her faculties she has acquired that capacity for viewing, assorting and arranging the facts within her knowledge, which is the essence of culture.

Helen delights in wandering in pastures new of knowledge, and her insatiable curiosity manifests itself in many directions. She is passionately fond of every branch of study, and her nimble fingers are constantly at work gathering information from various fields; but geography is her particular favorite. Foreign countries and their history and romantic traditions are peculiarly fascinating to her, and one of her sweetest dreams is to travel abroad when she reaches the thirteenth year of her age, and to visit England and the continent of Europe and their potentates and rulers. On these subjects she expressed herself in the following charming letter, which I received from her while I was preparing to cross the Atlantic, and which gives also some idea of her knowledge of the different varieties of roses, and of her enjoyments at home: --

TUSCUMBIA, ALA., May 18, 1889.

MY DEAR MR. ANAGNOS: -- You cannot imagine how delighted I was to receive a letter from you last evening. I am very sorry that you are going so far away. We shall miss you very, very much. I would love to visit many beautiful cities with you. When I was in Huntsville I saw Dr. Bryson, and he told one that he had been to Rome and Athens and Paris and London. He had climbed the high mountains in Switzerland and visited beautiful churches in Italy and France, and he saw a great many ancient castles. I hope you will please write to me from all the cities you visit. When you go to Holland please give my love to the lovely princess Wilhelmina. She is a dear little girl, and when she is old enough she will be the queen of Holland. If you go to Roumania please ask the good queen Elizabeth about her little invalid brother, and tell her that I am very sorry that her darling little girl died. I should like to send a kiss to Vittorio, the little prince of Naples, but teacher says she is afraid you will not remember so many messages. When I am thirteen years old I shall visit them all myself.