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From October 15, 1898, till July, 1899, she read many selections from Xenophon's works (the later books of the Anabasis, the Hellenica, the Cyropedia, Agesilaus, and the Symposium) and from Arrian and Thucydides. These passages were often made the basis of written examinations, in which she was not allowed the use of dictionary or grammar. At other times I translated to her passages which she had had trouble with. These were used as a means of teaching her new facts or principles of the language, or facts and principles of especial difficulty, or not at the time familiar enough to her, or to illustrate methods of study, or to give practice in translating the same passage closely into many forms of idiomatic English.

The amount of Greek Prose, however, which Helen has read is not great; not as much as my pupils usually read; but it has been very varied in style, and representing many phases of life and manners. It was difficult to find time to read more, with the Homer and Cicero and Virgil and Geometry demanding so much time. Geometry, even in the later months, kept absorbing more time than any other one subject. Homer and Cicero were only begun late in October, 1898, and there were at that time still eight Books of Virgil which I wished her to read.

Homer has from the first been a paradise to Miss Keller. After two or three preliminary talks on some of the most common peculiarities of Homeric Greek as distinguished from Attic, and some study of the history of the poems, with a little of the theories in the so-called Homeric Question, we plunged boldly into the Iliad itself. Her mind and fancy were allowed to range at will along that Trojan strand, where Chryses' prayers mingled with the sighs of ocean, and Achilles' petitioning cry reached the ears of his Nereid mother; the master hand of the greatest poet depicted upon her brain scenes of passion and strife and pity and love among gods and men -- scenes never before or since painted so simply and faithfully and vividly. Mentally she saw the sights and heard the sounds of those ancient days, as the blind bard had seen and heard them in the sky above and on the earth and sea.

In all her language study, I have allowed her to read thus by herself -- much as she would read English, and without minute analysis, or attention to details of construction and grammar. Of course, we lingered here and there on some passage of surpassing beauty, or power, or truth, but the pity of it seemed to be that the teacher's instinct and duty made me devote some time to the drudgery of etymology and syntax. For instance, 100 lines in Book I were ransacked for illustrations of Homeric forms and constructions, and for drill in derivation and scanning. And now and then, at later stages in the study of Homer, minute consideration was given to the mere mechanism of the language. All this was of course necessary for Helen as well as for any other pupil, as she is much in the habit of getting at the meaning of passages of foreign languages by intuitive insight, or by impulsive grasp, needing often the correction of grammatical literalness. This need has, however, not been seen so much in Greek as in Latin. For in her thirteen months' study of Greek with me she had, from the first, been trained to great precision and care in her examination of words and sentences. She became very skilful in her power of analysis of the word or phrase, and expert in inferring the meaning from derivation and construction in connection with the context. Her power of minute analysis had been carefully trained, and she seemed less inclined in Greek than in Latin toward premature inference of meaning without due attention to form of word and to grammar. In Latin I have found her much more likely to get a translation utterly wrong without her suspecting it, simply because she had neglected word-formation and syntax, and trusted only to the meanings of the words, all of which she knew. I think, too, it has been much more usual for her to get good idiomatic English in the translation of Greek than in the translation of Latin. This is probably partly due to the natures of the languages, to the comparative simplicity and clearness of thought and expression in the Greek prose and in the Homer, while in Cicero and in Virgil there are greater complexity and subtlety. But I believe her comparative difficulties at first in learning Cicero were also due to a weaker power and habit of analysis of word and sentence. This power and habit she strengthened to a high degree finally, but only by considerable patience and prodding.

To return to the Homer. Helen read in all about six Books of the Iliad and Book I of the Odyssey. The Iliad Books were I -- III, IX, XVI, and parts of the later Books. Books I -- III and IX were in Braille, facilitating the work. I had, early in 1898, made out a list of the Books of the Iliad and Odyssey which I wished her to have in Braille, but there seemed to be some misunderstanding and much delay, so that we never received one-half of what we wanted. Book XVI and the later books were therefore read under difficulties and slowly.