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"She is endowed with the highest gifts,
The vision and the faculty divine."
Wordsworth.

Helen's mind seems almost to have created itself, springing up under every disadvantage, and working its solitary but resistless way through a thousand obstacles. It is enriched with an extraordinary set of powers and capacities, which are ever on the alert to serve it at its bidding and minister to its functions with alacrity and efficacy. Sense-perception, association, memory, imagination, comparison, abstraction, generalization and the reasoning power, -- all these are developed and in a way to balance each other. They enable her to receive, revive and modify perceptions; to analyze, sift, weigh and compare impressions; and to produce ideas which reflect not dimness or pale moonlight, but effulgent solar splendor.

But, brilliant and magnificent as is the constellation of Helen's intellectual faculties, some of the stars that compose it differ essentially from the rest in grandeur and lustre. Unquestionably the most luminous and resplendent among them are three, -- quickness of perception, memory and imagination. These constitute the essence of her genius.

Quickness of Perception.

"How fleet is a glance of her mind!
Compared with the speed of its flight,
The tempest itself lags behind,
And the swift-winged arrows of light."
Cowper.

Helen is most exquisitely organized. The elements that enter into the structure of her being are of the nicest and most refined character. Her power of perception is as remarkable as ever. Its keenness is truly marvellous. It almost robs physical blindness of its sting. It enables her to recognize objects more quickly and to comprehend them more deeply and fully than ordinary seeing and hearing persons do. She perceives everything in a flash. Her sensibility is so fine that the slightest touch or influence on her frame acts like an electric spark kindling a flame in her mind, which is firmly held in blaze by it, and renders things clear to the thinking and active principle within her. Her intellectual sight is not only free from the dimness which Aristotle compares to that of an owl's eyes, but it is of unsurpassed sharpness and infinite reach.

Last spring Helen made at Abbot Academy in Andover a little visit, of which a detailed description was written for the Boston Evening Transcript by a special correspondent. In the following extracts from this interesting account several instances of her marvellous quickness of perception are related: --

This morning Helen was invited by the art teacher to the cast-room of Abbot Academy. Here she saw for the first time a head of Niobe, and upon passing her hands over the face, she at once recognized its expression of suffering.

Her acquaintance with the great names in mythology, history and literature became apparent in the examination of other casts. Two heads of Nero -- one representing him as a child, and the other as an emperor -- were most carefully examined and contrasted, and it was a sad wonder to Helen how such "a sweet and innocent child" could develop into the wicked man she knew Nero to have been. From the lips of the man's face she quickly read the dominant characteristic of pride.

She was much impressed by the thought and sorrow depicted upon the face of Dante. When the face was named for her, she said at once, "He was an Italian writer and lived in Florence." Later in the day, as if the face was still present in her mind, she asked her teacher what had brought grief into Dante's life.

Venus was joyfully recognized, and a head of Zeus suggested a vivacious recitation of the following Homeric lines relating to Athena: --

"She sprang of a sudden from out the immortal head, shaking her pointed lance; huge Olympus was shaken to its base under the weight of the gray-eyed goddess, and all around the earth groaned terribly."

In decided contrast to the casts of ancient sculpture was a baby figure of the renaissance period of art. This was examined with loving tenderness, while to every feature of its face and form Helen applied descriptive words from a poem recently learned. As her hand rested upon the baby forehead, the words were --

"A brow reflecting the soul within,
Untouched by sorrow, unmarked by sin."

Helen showed much pleasure in receiving from the senior class of the school a cast of "The Lion of Lucerne," in remembrance of her visit. From the cast-room she went to a studio containing many articles used as subjects for sketching or painting. Here, as when among the casts, she exhibited an appreciative knowledge of whatever she examined. Very often one realized how poets' words had made things beautiful to her, as, for instance, when she examined a flax-wheel, and asked if the flax were blue, thinking of the poetical simile --

"Blue were her eyes as the fairy flax."

It was most interesting to note Helen's examination of two quaint little figures, illustrative of the story of "The Brownies." Her teacher did not suppose that Helen had ever heard of hard-working fairies; but, when told about the brownies, she remembered the elves who had helped a poor shoemaker make shoes.