Although I cannot see,
I am resolved that in this world
Contented I will be.
How many blessings I enjoy,
That other people don’t;
To weep and sigh because I’m blind,
I cannot, and I won’t!
When she was fifteen years old she entered the Institution for the Blind in New York City, where she soon began to develop her remarkable talent for writing verse. At first she wrote only secular songs. One of these, “Rosalie, the Prairie Flower,” brought the blind girl nearly $3,000 in royalties.
Strange to state, it was not until she was forty-one years old that her first hymn was written. It was in 1864 that she met the famous composer, W. B. Bradbury, and it was at his request that she made her first attempt at hymn-writing. Her first hymn began:
We are going, we are going,