A place in thy memory

Front matter

SS6BSK

■MM

«MMiiMwniwntumtwim« aasei

Chapter I Had I Known

Rochester, N. Y., November, 1846.

This hour, my precious mother, my whole heart is drawn out to you, and every thought in my soul is weary with longings for home. If this frail body could move with the fleetness of thought, how I would fly to you now and pillow my head on your breast, while your soft hand would dry these tears from my poor, poor eyes! Oh, that I could open them once more, mother, once more see your smiling face, and feel my spirit grow warm and gentle in the light of your eyes and your looks of love !

Tell me, dear mother, have you changed at all? Do you look as when I saw you last? Ah, could I have known that ere we should meet again the light would leave me, how I would have gazed on your form until on my spirit were engraven your every look and feature! You often come to me now when dreams possess my thoughts, and I hasten to tell you that dear William is dead; and then, by the strange contradiction of dreams, looking full into your pitying face, I tell you how sad it is not to see, how empty and lonely the world is since that awful waking that left me no more the light and the day. Before the words, though, are half fallen from my lips, the soul in me is startled from the dream to the yet more awful reality. Then, only the One in heaven " acquainted with griefs " can possibly know to pity, or to number, even, the agonies of such a waking — a waking whose struggles to be free seem never to end — struggles, alas ! when all is over, when hope is dead, and darkness itself seems stopping my breath. I have tried to be resigned, mother — tried to think it all for the best ; but, alas ! trying is only trying; and when I stand alone upon this sea of night, and remember that these black waves may go on breaking above and around me yet fifty, sixty, or even seventy years, my heart fails me, and, like the doubting Hebrew, I sink, sink, until an unseen arm lifts me, and a small still voice whispers to my soul, " Be still, and know that I am God." Oh, He must be in it all, mother; His hand is never quite " lifted up " from blessing, and dark and heavy as this privation is, it must be in some strange way all dewy with His mercy and shining with His love. No night can last alway, and there may be creeping slowly up to the rim of my life's horizon a morning whose dawn is not yet begun. Faith! thou mightiest angel of the soul, the light on whose wings chases away the shades of grief and puts fear to flight ; makes heaven a bright reality, and brings the departed so near, that, as in happy dreams, we hearken to their voices, and bask the while in the light of their smiles.

When Moses began his lonely journey up the side

HAD I KNOWN 3

of Pisgah, the clouds lowering above and around him gave little promise of the glory that lay beyond. And so now my dreaded journey to the New York Blind Institute may have concealed behind its gloom a little Canaan of hope for the future. At all events, music seems now the one outlook for my ever doing anything more in the world, and New York the only place possible for acquiring it. Senator Backus has arranged with the managers of the Institute that teaching the blind ones there orally an hour and a half each day is to cover the entire expense of my stav. So, for a while at least, I shall cease to be a

%/ 7 7

cause of solicitude to my friends, who have already showered kindnesses upon me until I have no new words to thank them in and no new thing to pray for them, But when new hills and new valleys intervene, and I am far, far away, mother, your anxious cares for your child will be kindled anew, and I fear your loving eyes will seldom be dry of their tears. But be comforted, mother. He whose tender love remembereth even the ravens and the little sparrows, never leaves nor forsakes those who put their trust in Him, and ere long I shall come to you again. My longing heart coaxes me to leave all and fly to you now, but duty points another way, which would be a dark and lonely way, indeed, but for the sweet hope-light Heaven seems already shedding over it all. Dear father's parting words are still fresh in my memory; and your prayers and your tears, mother, are locked in my heart. Your love is a sort of spirit-robe that covers all my thoughts, and I wear it everywhere.

Please kiss little sisters and brother often for me, and let them never forget their sister Helen. But they mnst not think of me only as something sad. I am growing more cheerful now — laugh sometimes, and may ere long become so much a bird of the night as to sing again. Indeed, since I have been with you all, and felt how surely nothing can ever separate me from your love, I have more courage.

Good-by, my dear, precious mother, and my blessed father, my loving sisters, and my one little brother. May our heavenly Father keep you all in His love, and set His whitest angels to watch around about you by night and by day.

I go to the Institution for one year — an age to look forward to; still, I may stay until able to play the organ in church, and I need not tell you how precious letters from home will be to me there.

Good-by, father; good-by, sweet mother, with love and kisses for each and every one, all dewy with tears and fervent with feelings that there are no words for.

To

Mrs. 0. Aldrich,

"Stone Cottage,"

Mumford, N. Y.

Chapter II The Fourth Scene

Blind Institute, New York, December, 1846.

As you predicted, my stranger escort was kindness itself, and all the way just as polite and beautiful as he could be. The night, though, was dark indeed descending the river, and the cold intense enough to make the hearts of the hills shiver. The November winds, too, howled their worst, and lying awake in my berth at night, breathless with fear, suddenly it flashed upon me : " Why ! this is the being ' borne or carried along through the darkness/ exactly as it was in the vision." But when at last this Blind Institute was reached, and its heavy doors banged behind me, I could think of nothing but Dante's " Inferno," and almost imagined myself moving its darkest shades among. Nor was the illusion lessened when, one after another, the sightless ones here were led up and their hands placed gropingly in mine by way of introduction.

You have often called me a hero, Phin. ; and now, looking back to that morning, I am almost inclined to call myself one. The angels, though, despite their pitying tears, saw perfectly just what a poor, weakhearted thing the spirit in me was; and they know, too, full well how many thousand times since my courage has been upon the very verge of failure. So, you see, self-praise would hardly look well in the eyes of such witnesses, and it is doubtless better that I say nothing about it.

Your letter came on Saturday, when it so happened that all the officers and teachers of the Institute were absent; and with it in my hand I ran many times from first to third floor, up and down the long iron stairs, dodging in at every door, seeking a pair of eyes. At length the good old fireman, aided by his glasses, spelled out for me " Phin." at the close. Then, curiosity being so far gratified, I essayed to go on with my practicing; but ever and anon my thoughts would stray to that letter, imagining all the droll, kindly things it doubtless contained, coming from you. And as often, too, my fingers played truant to their bidding, and went creeping softly over the keys — softly and more softly, while louder and louder rose the whisper in my heart :

Phin. is good ; Phin. is noble ; and how beautiful of him to be the first in all the world to get a letter to me here!

There must be someone in the world to love you, Phin. — someone whose great heart hung twained upon the tree of Life with yours; and however distant now, your kindred souls must be forever drawing nearer and nearer to each other. Indeed, God has never made such an anomaly as a single soul ; and though lost to me here, I still have my William up in heaven, with my promise to be ever waiting, waiting, written all over his blessed palms with my tears,

THE FOURTH SCENE 7

and sealed with kisses from my lips ; while across all the dark and lonely sea of life, my heart's one sweet pole-star is the blessed assurance that he is forever waiting and watching for me there.

The better to give those who have never seen an idea of how music is written, cards have been prepared for them with the notes, lines, bars, etc., raised or embossed. Beyond that, though, there is no such thing as music with raised notes. All are taught orally, and play from memory, just as I would have done in Rochester or elsewhere, only, perhaps, more scientifically. Professor Eieff , the head teacher, commences with every pupil as though he were to become a composer; which, you see, makes one in the end a very independent player, having modulation, transposition, etc., all at the finger-ends.

And as for the reading, the contrast between glancing one's eyes along the lines and creeping over them with one's fingers was so very painful to me, that my tears melted away the delicate words almost faster than I could decipher them. Raised print, too, is both expensive and cumbrous ; and so, the other day, after thinking it all over, I closed up the book, replaced it in the library, and bade adieu to all reading with the fingers for me. The card, though, invented in Paris for those who have once seen to write with, is a veritable mercy ; and who knows but that I shall yet come so near to Paradise Lost as to write myself out of this Institution with it! Small means, you know, sometimes work to great ends !

This is indeed a place where ladies retire from the world, take a black veil, and nevermore see the face of man; still, it is not a nunnery, and how cruel of you, Phin., to be torturing me with such gloomy questions about it ! No, no. In place of " prison bars or heavy grates " to whisper through, this Blind Institute is a beautiful aviarhim, from which the Great Trainer has only shut the light away, the while His sweet warblers the better learn the songs He would fain have them sing through all eternity! Indeed, notwithstanding the habits, manners, and ideas of the majority are as unlike the seeing world as possible, there are those among them who have attained to degrees of culture truly astonishing. And what marvellous memories, too, they all have ! One young lady I know can take six pieces of music at a threequarters-of-an-hour sitting, and remember them so as to teach them again and play them months afterward.

There are nine pianos in the building, and some eighty to practice upon them, affording, you see, scarcely an hour a day to each; at which rate I was becoming an organist rather slowly. But the other day the superintendent received a check from our good Mr. Champion, desiring him to rent a nice piano for me the remainder of the year. I have it now in the parlor, all by myself ; and you will know how I appreciate the beautiful favor when I tell you that I practice there seven, and sometimes eleven, hours out of the twenty-four. They have also two organs, besides violins, flutes, and a large brass band. All of these going, I sometimes quite forget that I am enclosed within gloomy, granite walls with iron doors, and seem almost the inhabitant of a spirit-

THE FOURTH SCENE 9

land, where harmony reigns and anthems are ever new; or, as Hosmer says,

" And ever throbs with melody the air."

Yon ought to come here some time, Phin., if only to take a run with me around the gymnastic pole, or a walk on the promenade grounds, or a swing in what they call the " scup " ; all of which exercises I compel myself to the more rigorously as I find myself the less inclined to them. I also walk awhile every morning on the upper piazza, on the side of the building that looks away toward Rochester, to whose Eden of light and love, alas ! I may return no more, nevermore !

Oh, beautiful, beautiful Rochester ! within the roar of whose falls my eyes first opened to the world, and there they closed upon its glories forever. There I listened to the last whisper of love to my heart, and set up the years of my life a lonely Mizpah to its memory; there I saw the death-angel break the idol of my affections, and hasten to lay him away in the grave; there, when tears had drowned the light from my eyes and turned my morning into a night-time of woe, strangers forgot their own griefs and vied with each other in their haste to bring blessing and comfort to me. Oh, chide me not, then, if, forgetting all the world beside, I should still remember beautiful, love-lighted Rochester, blest not more for the white bread she has broken to the world, than for the golden fruits and purple clusters forever ripening upon her fields and hanging pendant from her walls.

Dear, beautiful Rochester, enthroned in peace and sceptred with plenty, my heart hastens to crown her as memory has embalmed her: proudest, queenliest city of the world, resting calm upon the bosom of the dear Genesee, with her green-bordered mantles floating about her ! I see her there now, as I saw her last, looking half distraught in her dream of beauty. harking alternate to the rocking lullabies of her own murmuring river, and the bugle blasts, the trumpet winds, and roundelay breezes of blue Ontario.

To

Mr. Phix. Homan,

"Advertiser " Office,

Rochester, X. Y

Chapter III Who Shall Chide

Blind Institute, New York, January, 1847.

This hour I sit me down to write you in a little world of sweet sounds. The choir in the chapel is chanting at the organ the evening hymn, and across the hall a little group with a piano and flute is turning the very atmosphere into melody; while, in a room below, some twenty little blind girls are joining their silvery voices in tones sweet and pure as angel whispers ; but ah, here comes one who has strayed from their number the twentieth time to-day, clambering her little arms about my neck for a kiss. Earth has no treasure so heavenly as the love of a sinless child. Man seldom welcomes you farther than the fair vestibule of his heart, but a child invites you within the temple, where alone the iucense of unselfish love burns upon its own altar.

It is evening. The moonbeams gladden all the hills. The stars are out, and I see them not. Once my poor eyes loved to watch those wheeling orbs till they seemed joyous spirits bathing in the holy light of the clear upper skies. Now they are not all lost to me; fancy, with a soul-lit look, often wanders in the halls of memory, where hang daguerreotypes of all that is bright and beautiful in Nature, from the

I should be on that dark side that Phin. accuses me of leaving out of rny letters ; but really there is no dark side here, save when my heart chances to suffer an eclipse from some one of its own opaque erratics, pride or despair!

Smile ehidingly, please, upon your dear aunt, Mrs. Snow, and tell her that her letter will have to be long indeed to compensate the tardiness of its coming. She is a sweet procrastinator, though, and but for the loneliness of this place I should be almost reconciled to taking the will for the deed, just to oblige her !

How kind it was of you all to miss me your first sleigh ride or Snow-ride; and how sweet of little Louise to imagine the ponies looking around to see if I were in! May the angels keep close watch of the dear child for that, even as I would fain have them neglect a little their harps to stand guardians along thy way.

I thought of you New Year's Day, New Year's evening, and the night of your party, until my heart grew luminous with the joys I fancied blending their lights around yours. And did I envy you? Ah, no, sweet one; this room, with its nine slim little beds, almost painful in their bleak whiteness, was only so much brighter and warmer having you to think of, and the dear ones of " Snowdrop mansion " to remember, whose names all in heaven must see clustered upon my lips ere my head is bowed or one thought of mine has kneeled to pray.

To

Miss Sarah Fuller,

Rochester, N. Y.

Chapter IV A Little Sunny Isle

Blind Institute, New York, February, 1847.

The love of many hearts ends in this life ; the love of others ends with it ; but my love for yon, Mary, will be new when the stars are old, and bright when the world has passed away.

It is morning, glorious morning! and with the fleetness of fancy I am with yon again as in the beautiful bygone, listening for lessons of wisdom from the lips of those learned professors. Pray, in what new fields are you searching for gems of thought this winter? Have you still Hebrew and French with Professor Hoyt? And what of Cicero's Orations? His " Nihils " to Catiline ring in my ears yet, and will, so long as memory brings back to them the music of your voice.

So Professor Whitlocke wept when they told him that the light had left my eyes forever ! Please thank him for those tears, Mary, and tell him for me that so long as memory brings back to my heart his benign face, his precious lessons, and all the suns and stars he taught me to trace, my thoughts will not be wholly dark. Oh, some day I must come to dear Lima again, if only to tread over those hallowed grounds, and hear once more the voices of those beloved and revered teachers !

Does the "Ladies' Literary Society" prosper?

Your president, Eliza B , passed a day with me in

K and I prompted to her an article for your

paper — a poor acknowledgment, though, for the beautiful note she brought me and its grateful contents.

Mary, you will be glad to know that, slowly, I am becoming indeed the philosopher that I seem, smiling out of grief. But sometimes this perpetual gloom is so heavy, that beneath its awful weight I seem sinking through space, lost, lost ! But, as Plutarch says : " Practice adds in all things to our powers ; " so, ere long I hope to become stronger and wiser, and better schooled to my strange lot.

My dear father and mother came to see me, expecting to take me home with them. Dr. Munn, though, would not hear a word to my leaving the city then, entertaining, I think, a little hope of restoring my sight. But our souls know some things independent of any modus operandi for gaining knowledge, of which we are able to take cognizance ; and however I allowed hope in my heart to gild its darkness, I knew that I could no more escape from it than the world escape the night. No, Mary, that wide-awake, noonday vision of darkness, that you and Carrie amused yourselves so much trying to interpret for me, and Libbie Smith finally declared to be " a new edition of Daniel's vision," and advised that " notes be taken of it immediately and placed among the archives of the Seminary," was, in truth, but a strange foreshadowing of what has so sadly overtaken me. Do you see ? — solving those astronomic problems from Legendre that morning, had lifted my thoughts to such Pisgah

A LITTLE SUNNY ISLE 17

heights as to overlook, in an instant, not Canaan, but the desert, alas ! and the long wilderness way that lay before me. One feature of it, however, was not so unpleasant to come upon — the mystic old shape of blackness, I mean, that, while filling the world with its gloom, amazed me with the countless specks of gold shining in its surface.

This is a day of no open vision, surely; but since the darkness of mine and the two scenes preceding it have so strangely come to pass, why not look for all the others that in those few twinkling seconds were trailed before my spirit eyes ? The end, though, with its radiant dawn from afar melting in myriad rainbows through the fleeing clouds, need be no dream or vision, so only I have patience to wait and faith to claim at last that most beautiful of all promises, " There shall be light at evening-time."

My dear, tender, loving mother could not be reconciled to see her first-born so bereaved; but dear father dried away his tears and lifted up his voice in thanks when I told him that I had come both to see and to feel that it is all for the best. But oh, to be ihe cause of sorrow and privation to those whom we love, is the most bitter cup misfortune ever presses to human lips; and but that the prospect of music here opened a way for me to save their already struggling bark the additional weight of my life-long dependence, I should have been wretched indeed. Oh, how surely God's ways are not as our ways, and how worse than vain to plan or fear for the future !

Your good uncle's parish is large, and his residence a long way off; yet, as you can imagine, he did not forget his unfortunate pupil in E ; and when I

forget him, gratitude will have no more a name or a place in the world. His prayer and benediction hallowed our marriage, while his warm, loving words shed their light over dear William's way far down to the grave. I thought I owed him for everything then — minister, teacher, and friend — but oh, his great sympathizing heart has been to me since a thousand, thousand times more — even a little city of refuge when the world grew dark, and heaven seemed too far away to pity or to save. Dear Mrs. Seager, too, you may know, was a good angel to find in this, my wilderness Marah. Her love and devotion more than once turned its bitter waters sweet.

But, dearest Mary, can the hearts of my friends be always warming toward me as now? Will not this perpetual night ere long freeze the morning of love from me, too 1 Alas ! it must be so ; I know it, I feel it; and far out in the midst of this sea of darkness my heart is already creating for itself a little sunny isle with summers and flowers perennial, gathering thither all the beautiful things and all the loved ones that my eyes have ever looked on. There, beneath the enchanted skies of happy memory, nothing will ever fade or pass away. Indeed, long, long years hence, even myself will come back to me the same as the last evening, when my tearful eyes chanced to rest upon myself in a mirror. Ah, yes ; no matter how faded and old and changed my friends and all the world may grow, to my heart they are embalmed forever in a beautiful spring-time of smiling memories. Besides, heaven came very near when it took the light

A LITTLE SUNNY ISLE 19

and all that I loved away — so near, that those radiant skies, studded over with the constellated glories of God, seem now but a little way yonder; and when these clouds gather too thick around me, my soul puts on wings and goes to breathe the expansive airs, and revel amid the white scenes and ecstatic joys of spiritbeing, until an earthly something draws me back, whispering, Not yet, no, not yet !

Adieu, dearest Mary. Long life to thee, and all honors and pleasures rise up in thy path ; love deeds make the light of thy memory, and the smile of the Saviour be ever the joy of thy heart !

To

Miss Mary S eager,

Lima, N. Y.

Chapter V As Erst I Was

Blind Institute, New York, March, 1847. Since my entrance within the walls of this gloomy institution the days and weeks and months would have lengthened their shadows over my heart far more slowly, but for finding here straightway a pencil-guiding card that has enabled me to keep some little connection with the outside world. Never so much as one crooked line from it, though, to you, my best of friends ; still, do not wrong me by supposing from my silence that I forget you. Oh, no. I look back to the hour of my solemn marriage, and lo ! you are there. Then William's last smile warms over my heart, and I see you by me still, weeping tears where it was impossible to console. Then, all too swift, my thoughts come to that awful night when I slept a troubled sleep, and awoke but to find that the black angel of Destiny had swooped down and folded me close in his wings. Ah, then, too, when despair had crushed me and I lay there all dark and hopeless, lacking courage to pray and waiting only for the death that would not come, it was you, dear, dear Miss Crane, who bent over me with such pity as only the soul of woman, stung by another's woe, can possibly feel. It was you who whispered : " Live, live,

AS ERST 1 WAS 21

my child ! God will take care of you. I will be your friend, arid you shall never want for anything." Oh, how my fainting spirit took refuge in those few words of love ; and through the long weary night-days after, how I learned to wait for your coming and listen for your welcome tread!

The days were indeed long and lonely then; but oh, the loneliness that has sometimes overshadowed me here is beyond words. Often I have seemed standing alone, so far removed from all objects of sight and sense as to belong scarcely to heaven or earth. Indeed, since my departure from Rochester to be borne I hardly knew where, until I found myself barred within these institution walls, I have known woe, God, such as the angels must shudder to look on!

But, alas ! wherever we take up blessings, we must needs, I believe, always lay something down. The angel who blessed Jacob left him limping; and as afterward the great father of prophets passed over to the revengeful Esau and came to his inheritance all the safer for his halting, so I have come to feel that this humiliating privation of mine, shackling alike hand and foot, is to be to me a safeguard across some far-off Penuel to that gloomy old pillar in the vision that I so strangely sat up there and told you all about the last night I was ever to see. Miss Cornstock brought it up by what she said to Tody, and then nothing would do, you remember, but it must be related from beginning to end; and as I went on, recalling that singular experience that for two years had seemed too visionary to name, how little I realized that the dark reality was even then hovering at the door, and ere the morning would steal in and wrap me forever in its gloomy folds. But, alas ! it was so ; and if you can believe it, my coming to this Blind Institution was exactly one more of the scenes that I pictured to you then — the fourth one, of being borne or carried along through the darkness. Possibly it is here, too, that I am ere long to face that mystic old presence with the shining bits of gold in its surface. Who knows what strange shapes this darkness may yet take on? And who knows, too, but my real night may yet come to be enriched and blessed, even as was the presaging or foreshadowing one? Or was I dreaming then, dreaming now, and the whole thing only a dream after all? Oh, would it were, and I might yet awaken and find the sun still in the sky, dear William still in the world, living and loving as before, lighting joys around my heart and gladdening the world with his smile !