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"Ours is the darkness -- thine the light.
Within thy brow a glory plays;
Shrine, blossom, dewdrop, all are bright
With quenchless rays."

Memory.

"Hail, Memory, hail! in thy exhaustless mine
From age to age unnumber'd treasures shine!
Thought and her shadowy brood thy call obey,
And place and time are subject to thy sway!"
Rogers.

Helen is a true daughter of Mnemosyne. Her memory is one of her most powerful faculties. It is a kingdom in which she reigns supreme, -- a paradise out of which she cannot be driven away. It furnishes her reasoning powers with food, and retains an infinite number of facts and impressions in perfect order. Its capacity is almost boundless and its tenacity fairly marvellous. Feelings, volitions, perceptions, thoughts, events, figures, names of persons and places, she remembers with remarkable vividness and distinctness. She never allows them to die in oblivion. She does not know the taste of the Lethean waters. Her mind is a vast repository of impressions and recollections, which are imprinted upon its texture like pictures upon the photographic glass. Images once made on it never fade or vanish. They are fixed therein so firmly that no lapse of time, nor nervous agitation, nor accumulation of work nor any other cause, can displace them.

Kant distinguished between three kinds of memory, namely, the mechanical, the ingenious and the judicious; and Helen's unquestionable ability to learn by heart and to remember things either by introducing artificial connecting links among them or by means of their natural relation in thought, shows that she possesses all these three varieties.

From a very extensive record of well-authenticated instances of Helen's tenacious memory we cull the following:

One day last winter, when talking to her about Munich and its environs, I told her that there were five bridges over the river Isar. "No," said she gently; "according to a letter which you wrote to me from Vienna there are only four." An examination of my memoranda proved that she was correct and that I was mistaken.

Again, in a lecture on Rome, which I gave in the hall of the institution to the members of our household, I said that, according to some of the most recent and reliable authorities, the height of St. Peter's cathedral from the pavement to the summit of the cross of the dome is 460 feet. No sooner was this statement conveyed to Helen by the fingers of her teacher than she remarked to the latter, "No, this number is wrong. The right one is 435." This last figure is the exact measurement of Carlo Fontana, which I had mentioned to her in one of my letters about Italy.

By perusing once or twice those of the poems of Longfellow, Whittier, Dr. Holmes, Lowell, Byron, Tennyson and others, which are printed in raised characters, Helen learns many of them by heart and recites them with great fluency and spirit. Among the Christmas carols, which were published last year, there was one written by Dr. Brooks. This she committed to memory by having it read twice to her, and she could repeat it word for word.

These are only a few examples of the very numerous feats of Helen's wonderful memory, which are no less astonishing than those of the ancient Greeks mentioned by Plutarch; but both time and space forbid us to add more to the list, which might be lengthened ad infinitum.

The marvellous power of retaining in the mind such varieties and diversities of past events, thoughts and ideas is generally esteemed as a special gift, and not as an art nor as the result of training and practice; yet, to use Cowper's words, --

"Much depends, as in the tiller's toil,
On culture and the sowing of the soil."

But be this as it may, in Helen's case too much care cannot be taken to avoid overburdening and taxing any of her mental faculties too severely. We must not lose sight of the fact that Atlas was weary, and that even the camel rider has sense enough to allow the animal to rise when it has its full load.

Imagination.

"Above, below, in ocean and in sky,
Thy fairy worlds, Imagination, lie."
Campbell.

Helen's imagination is luxuriant. It is irrepressible, unconfinable. It is like a vast mirror of the mind, on which the images of external objects are reflected in perfect form and with astonishing velocity. By the aid of this faculty she projects her thought into the unseen universe, and discovers in it a multitude of charms that conceal themselves from the generality of mankind. As she is shut out to a very great extent from the real world, she creates an imaginary one for herself, and, with a power akin to necromancy, conjures glorious shapes and pictures and brilliant visions to make solitude populous and irradiate the gloom of the dungeon.

The development of Helen's imagination began at an early period of her education. As soon as her mind was freed from its confinement and exposed to the light and the air and the showers of heaven, the seeds of this faculty, together with those of the others, burst out and grew to maturity. The following extract from one of Miss Sullivan's letters bears testimony to this fact: --