t till the night is o'er;
Wait till I see the morning
Break on the golden shore.

Frances Jane Crosby, 1869.

FANNY CROSBY, AMERICA'S BLIND POET

Blindness is not always an affliction. If it serves to give the soul a
clearer vision of Christ and of His redeeming love, as it did with Fanny
Crosby, it may rather be regarded as a blessing.

America's most famous hymn-writer could never remember having seen the
light of day, nevertheless her life was one of the most happy and
fruitful ever lived. Always she radiated a sweet and cheerful spirit,
refusing to be pitied, while her soul poured out the songs that brought
joy and salvation to countless multitudes.

Born of humble parents at Southeast, N. Y., March 24, 1823, she was only
six weeks old when, through the application of a poultice to her eyes,
her sight was forever destroyed. Such a disaster would have cast a
perpetual gloom over most lives, but not so with Fanny Crosby. Even at
the age of eight years she gave evidence not only of her happy optimism
but also of her poetic genius by penning the following cheerful lines:

O what a happy soul am I!
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,
To a home beyond the skies,
Where the fields are robed in beauty,
And the sunlight never dies.

She now felt that she had found her real mission in life, and she wrote
that she was "the happiest creature in all the land." Until her death in
1915, hymns flowed from her inspired pen in a ceaseless stream. For a
long time she was under contract to furnish her publishers, Biglow &
Main, with three hymns every week. It has been estim