INTRODUCTION.


Mrs. Arms has asked me to write an introduction to her book. It hardly
seems to need it. The title-page shows that it was written by one who is
blind. It is a sequel to another volume. That volume has been widely sold,
and all who read it will, I am sure, have some desire to see how the
stream of the life of its writer has been flowing since her first book was
written. Her patient perseverance under privations has won her a large
circle of personal friends, who will take pleasure in procuring and
preserving this fresh memento of the Blind Girl.

Such a book as this has a value which, probably, has not occurred to its
author. She has put on record the phenomena of her life as she has
recollected them, with great simplicity, merely for the entertainment of
her readers, without attaching any importance to the value which every
such memoir has in the department of science. But it is just from the
study of such phenomena as these that the students in mental and moral
philosophy learn the laws of mind and the operations of a human soul under
a divine, moral government. As a matter of taste we might omit the
writer's description of her husband, whom she never yet has seen, p. 45,
and her account of her love affairs, p. 49; and if we had discretionary
editorship, and the volume had been written by one having always had her
sight, we should unhesitatingly exclude such passages. But, as the records
of the impressions, consciousnesses and general mental phenomena of a
blind girl _in love_, they stand to be, perhaps, quoted hereafter in some
abstruse scientific treatise, or bloom out in some perennial poem.