Excerpt from The Double Night and Other Poems Before his blindness he had received the bare rudiments of an English education in the country schools of that day. Later he spent a year at the Kentucky Institute for the Blind, and fourteen months at the Ohio Institute, leaving the latter when about twenty years of age. Meanwhile he had applied himself earnestly to the study of music. His mental activity seems to have been stimulated by his deprivations. He read eagerly everything printed in raised type, and, until he lost his hearing, extended his knowledge of books with the aid of friends who enjoyed reading aloud to him. Of the poems in this volume, most were written after Mr. Heady's fortieth year. I have said they are almost unique in interest; nor do I use this term simply because their author is blind and deaf. They contain one of the most elaborate experiments in hexameter yet made by an English poet, and that, too, by an English poet entirely ignorant of the classic models. The grammarian, Noble Butler, once congratulated Mr. Heady on this fact, on the ground that a knowledge of Homeric and Virgilian hexameter could not but impede an English poet. Whether fortunate or unfortunate in this respect, Mr. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.