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Helen did no work with me in Latin until late in October, 1898. We then began Cicero. She had in Braille the four Catiline Orations, the Manilian Law and Archias. These she read entire, as so much literature, and as rapidly and freely as she wished. She read thus two Catiline Orations before I cross-questioned her much on the text and tested her translations, to learn her defects and needs. Then we went over the Third Catiline Oration together carefully, with minute attention to grammar, analysis of word and sentence, rhetorical order of words, style, logic, etc.

Helen also read by the manual alphabet selections from many of Cicero's works, -- chiefly political speeches, but some philosophical passages. We read during the last three months the best parts of Pro P. Sestio, De Provinciis Consularibus, and In L. Calpurnium Pisonem. These selections and parts of Orations were carefully reviewed in recitations, with a view to giving her the kind of drill I had found she needed. The passages selected were usually hard, of varied styles and subject-matter; and she often had considerable trouble with them at first. Indeed, I was often rather surprised at the perversity of meaning, or the poor English resulting from her work. For every one knows Helen's skill in English. The nature of the difficulties and the reasons for them I have somewat discussed already. I had especial trouble in teaching her analysis of words. In Latin she seemed to look upon a compound or derived word as an entity, or at least to lack the habit of picking the word to pieces and seeing the probable meaning by derivation. She eventually acquired the habit, but it took longer than I thought it ought to take with one possessed of her remarkable memory.

Her translations in Latin were rarely bad from being too literal, but generally from being too free without giving the sense, or giving it imperfectly. She had to learn to translate literally, or rather see the meaning without translation in the Latin order, as a Roman would have seen it. After several perusals of a passage in that manner, she was taught to turn it into good English. Thus she learned the Latin idiom, and drop-ping it from consciousness but holding to the idea, sought an English idiom for the expression of that idea. Of course these processes are not easy. The learning of Latin idioms is difficult enough; to see the real meaning of the Latin idiom when its literal translation seems nonsense is hard enough; but to drop the mould in which the thought has once been cast and find a new and appropriate English mould is often harder still. In short, the art of good translation is far more difficult than even many good and experienced teachers of language realize.

Again, the subject-matter of Cicero's harder passages, the political, constitutional, legal, and social questions involved in them, the rhetoric and logic, and the consequent peculiarities of phraseology, order and style, present to most pupils hard problems, compared with the usually simple narrative of Caesar or Nepos. Miss Keller in particular must have found much in Cicero foreign to her experience, and hard to comprehend.

But she overcame all difficulties. She has attained the facility of understanding Cicero and translating him into idiomatic English that brings to its possessor delight. She appreciates and admires the brilliancy of Cicero's eloquence, the copiousness of his diction, the vehemence of his invective and satire, the subtlety of his irony, the lofty grandeur of his moral sentiments, and the nobility and wisdom of much of his political philosophy. She has, too, noted his defects -- his vanity, his habit of loquacious self-praise, the foulness of his scurrility, and the specious or disingenuous quality of many of his arguments.

In Virgil, Miss Keller has been her own teacher more than in any other subject. I have read with her only 500 or 600 lines (these, however, very carefully and slowly), while she has read about 10,000 lines -- the whole of the Aeneid and a little from the Eclogues. It seems easy and natural for her to see the meaning and appreciate the inner feeling of the great Roman poet. She had read about three Books before October, 1898, and she read in the following six or seven months six Books more, leaving for very rapid reading, during May and June, 1899, Books X, XI, and XII. Her translations to me were at first too free, and often inaccurate, but later they became close and exact, idiomatic and rhythmical. The diction became highly poetic, both in choice and order of words and phrases, and in structure of sentences. I believe Miss Keller is capable of giving the world, at some future time, in rhythmical prose, a new version of Virgil, which would possess high and peculiar merit.

To sum up, Miss Keller was fitted to pass the Radcliffe Examinations in Elementary Algebra and Plane Geometry in thirteen months; in Elementary Greek Prose, omitting the two months spent in it before she began work with me, in thirteen months; in the last nine Books of Virgil in about eight months; in Cicero in eight months; in Homer in eight months. Doubtless in all of these subjects she could have passed good examinations even had they been taken considerably earlier -- the Algebra and Greek Prose three months, and the others one or two months earlier.