Visual impairment men in the dark) touch an elephant to learn what it is like. Each one feels a different part, but only one part, such as the side or the tusk. They then compare notes and learn that they are in complete disagreement. "Three Blind Mice" is a medieval English nursery rhyme about three blind mice whose tails are cut off after chasing the farmer's wife. The work is explicitly incongruous, ending with the comment "Did you ever see such a sight in your life, As three blind mice?" Poet John Milton, who went blind in mid-life, composed On His Blindness,
Nursery rhyme Little Star" which combines the melody of an 18th-century French tune "Ah vous dirai-je, Maman" with a 19th-century English poem by Jane Taylor entitled "The Star" used as lyrics. Early folk song collectors also often collected (what are now known as) nursery rhymes, including in Scotland Sir Walter Scott and in Germany Clemens Brentano and Achim von Arnim in "Des Knaben Wunderhorn" (1806–1808). The first, and possibly the most important academic collection to focus in this area was James Orchard Halliwell's "The Nursery Rhymes of England" (1842) and "Popular Rhymes and Tales" in 1849, in which he divided rhymes into