I could make a very interesting volume of the letters I have received from correspondents unknown to the world of authorship, but writing from an instinctive impulse, which many of them say they have long felt and resisted.  One must not allow himself to be flattered into an overestimate of his powers because he gets many letters expressing a peculiar attraction towards his books, and a preference of them to those with which he would not have dared to compare his own.  Still, if the homo unius libri—­the man of one book—­choose to select one of our own writing as his favorite volume, it means something,—­not much, perhaps; but if one has unlocked the door to the secret entrance of one heart, it is not unlikely that his key may fit the locks of others.  What if nature has lent him a master key?  He has found the wards and slid back the bolt of one lock; perhaps he may have learned the secret of others.  One success is an encouragement to try again.  Let the writer of a truly loving letter, such as greets one from time to time, remember that, though he never hears a word from it, it may prove one of the best rewards of an anxious and laborious past, and the stimulus of a still aspiring future.

Among the letters I have recently received, none is more interesting than the following.  The story of Helen Keller, who wrote it, is told in the well-known illustrated magazine called “The Wide Awake,” in the number for July, 1888.  For the account of this little girl, now between nine and ten years old, and other letters of her writing, I must refer to the article I have mentioned.  It is enough to say that she is deaf and dumb and totally blind.  She was seven years old when her teacher, Miss Sullivan, under the direction of Mr. Anagnos, at the Blind Asylum at South Boston, began her education.  A child fuller of life and happiness it would be hard to find.  It seems as if her soul was flooded with light and filled with music that had found entrance to it through avenues closed to other mortals.  It is hard to understand how she has learned to deal with abstract ideas, and so far to supplement the blanks left by the senses of sight and hearing that one would hardly think of her as wanting in any human faculty.  Remember Milton’s pathetic picture of himself, suffering from only one of poor little Helen’s deprivations: 

             “Not to me returns
   Day, or the sweet approach of even or morn,
   Or sight of vernal bloom, or summer’s rose,
   Or flocks, or herds, or human face divine;
   But cloud instead, and ever-during dark
   Surrounds me, from the cheerful ways of men
   Cut off, and for the book of knowledge fair
   Presented with a universal blank
   Of Nature’s works, to me expunged and rased,
   And wisdom at one entrance quite shut out.”

Surely for this loving and lovely child does

          “the celestial Light
     Shine inward.”

Anthropologist, metaphysician, most of all theologian, here is a lesson which can teach you much that you will not find in your primers and catechisms.  Why should I call her “poor little Helen”?  Where can you find a happier child?