Blind Girl, The.
Her First Published Work
Crosby, Frances Jane. The Blind Girl, and other poems. A pupil at the New-York Institution for the Blind. New York: Wiley & Putnam, 1844.
8vo.; endpapers foxed and dampstained; brown cloth stamped in blind; spine stamped in gilt and blind.
First edition of Crosby’s first book; with frontispiece photograph opposite title page; also includes a Preface and a Dedication page; and 67 poems.
The Preface explains that Crosby was blinded when she was six weeks old and was admitted to the New-York Institution for the Blind at age 15. The writer of the Preface also reveals that Crosby’s education was limited, since her father died when she was an infant and her mother was “left in indigent circumstances, to provide for herself, and therefore unable to bestow that care on her sightless daughter, which she so much needed” (p. 9). The writer attributes the “dawn of her mental existence” upon her admittance to the Institution; and modestly concludes:
Whatever merit the public may accord to these effusions, most of which were addressed to personal friends as occasioned by the incidents to which they refer, and were not designed for the press; it may rest assured that the several pieces are the unaided productions by the authoress. They were penned from dictation, with very little revision by herself, and less from any other source. Thus in many instances much of the spirit of the composition may have been lost by punctuation, which had it been done by the composer, would convey more justly the thoughts intended.
Crosby dedicates this book of poetry to the managers of the Institution of the Blind; appropriate, written in the form of a poem. In it, she praises their guidance and credits them with her nascence as a poet. It reads, in part:
Since those whose judgment I esteem/Superior to my own,/These scattered thoughts, which have employed/My leisure hours alone,/Advise, that to the public eye/They should presented be;/Though such a step, till counseled thus,/Had ne’er occurred to me:/The course, which author’s have pursued,/I too would imitate,/And to some valued friend or friends/This work would dedicate. (p. 11)
The majority of her poems are politically or religiously-themed – like eulogies – or related to her blindness and the struggle of being handicapped. The title-poem, “The Blind Girl,” is the first poem in the collection. Others include: “The Rise and Progress,” “Dedication of the Chapel,” “To the Senate of the State,” “The Blind Girl’s Lament,” “The Captive,” “On the Death of a Parent,” “On the Death of the Father of a Fellow Pupil,” and “To Solitude.” In “The Blind Girl’s Song,” she writes:
They tell me of a sunny sky,
Tinged with etherial (sic) light
But, ah! for me, no sunbeams shine,
My day is veil’d in night.
Yet, there’s a beam, a nobler beam,
Of knowledge, bright and fair;
That beam may light my darken’d path,
And soften every care.
The moon that o’er the sleeping earth,
Shines forth in majesty,
The sparkling deep that proudly rolls,
Hath no delights for me.
Yet I can hear a brother’s vice,
In tenderest accents speak;
And feel a sister’s pearly tear,
Steal gently on my cheek.
Crosby wrote seven other books of poetry: Monterey and Other Poems (1851); A Wreath of Columbia's Flowers (1858); Crowning the Year (1881); Bells at Evening and Other Verses (1897); Ode to the Memory of Captain John Underhill (1902); Fanny Crosby's Life-Story, by Herself (1903); and Memories of Eighty Years (1906).
It is her hymns, however, for which she is most well-known. Her obituary claims she is the author of over 8,000 hymns, which also include cantatas and secular songs –– including "Blessed Assurance," "Crowning the Year: Written for the Watch-night Service," "I Am Thine, O Lord," "Jesus Is Calling," "Safe in the Arms of Jesus," which was played during President Grant’s funeral, and "Savior, More than Life to Me.” She often wrote under pseudon
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