Page:Famous Living Americans, with Portraits.djvu/303

284 FAMOUS MVING AMERICANS Latin poetry and Shakespeare 's plays. Her comments show her appreciation and perception. Of Virgil and Homer she says that the gods and men in the ^neid move like graceful figures on an Elizabethan mask, but in the Iliad they leap and sing. '^ Virgil is serene and lovely like a marble Apollo in the moonlight; Homer is a beautiful, animated youth in the full sunlight with the wind in his hair.** ** Great poetry,** she de- clares, ^' needs no other interpreter than a responsive heart Would that the hosts of those who make the great works of the poets odious by their analysis, impositions and laborious comments, might learn this simple truth.** Among French writers her favorites when she was in college were MoUere and Bacine, and of the German, Goethe and Schiller. She says, **My spirit reverently follows them into regions where Beauty and Truth and Goodness are one. * * Did any girl ever have such a list of distinguished acquaint- ances and friends ! Among them have been Bishop Brooks, Henry Drummond, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Whittier, Edward Everett Hale, Joe Jefferson, Mary Mapes Dodge, Kate Doug- las Wiggin, Dr. Alexander Bell, Lawrence Hutton, W. D. Howells, Mark Twain, Richard Watson Gilder, Edmund C. Stedman, Charles Dudley Warner, and John Burroughs. Her dearest and truest friend, however, must ever be the woman who came to her on what she calls * * the most important day in all my life*' — Anne Mansfield Sullivan, who has been much more than teacher. All that love and sympathy, tact and tireless effort could effect, Miss Sullivan accomplished. Miss Sullivan is now Mrs. Macy, having married the man who com- piled and edited the life and letters of Helen Keller with re- ports and letters of her teacher. Helen Keller has given ex- pression to many heart-felt appreciations of her lifelong friend and guide. Among other things she says, **My teacher is so near to me that I scarcely think of myself apart from her. How much of my delight in all beautiful things is innate and how much due to her, I can never tell. I feel that her be- ing is inseparable from my own and that the footsteps of my life are in hers. All the best of me belongs to her — there is