Where to find Hinds' Feet On High Places Audio and how to use it
I've run into this request enough times at work that I keep meaning to write it down properly. The book is public domain, which makes everything simpler than it should be. Helen Hunt Jackson wrote it in 1895 as an allegory based on the healing of Naaman in 2 Kings 5. It's not particularly long — roughly 70 to 80 pages in most editions — and the prose is straightforward Victorian English, which affects how you'd want to listen to it. There are three main places I actually use. LibriVox has a full narration uploaded by various volunteers. The production quality varies between recordings, and I usually listen to the older uploads first because they tend to have fewer background noises. The newer ones sometimes have people recording with USB mics in untreated rooms and you can hear the refrigerator cycling on and off. That's my actual problem — the 2019 recitation had a noticeable hum that made it nearly unwatchable for long stretches. I just downloaded the 2008 version instead and the difference was night and day. Audiobook.com and similar platforms sometimes list it, but most commercial releases are just read-throughs with no additional value. You're paying for narration that costs nothing on LibriVox, so unless there's a specially produced version with musical interludes or dramatic reading, there's no reason to spend money on it.
If you want to make your own version, download the public domain text from Project Gutenberg, paste it into any text-to-speech engine that supports SSML, and you can adjust the pacing for the more difficult passages. The allegory has some sections that move fast and others that are slow meditations. A one-speed narration flattens that out. I use a custom ElevenLabs voice with a slightly slower default rate and then manually extend the pauses around the chapter breaks. Takes about twenty minutes if you have the text ready. The biggest issue people run into is the language. Jackson writes in a style that assumes you're comfortable with older phrasing. Things like "the King's highway" don't mean a literal road — it's a specific term in her allegorical system that refers to the direct path to the Mountain of the King. If you're listening passively, you'll gloss over these distinctions and miss what she's actually doing. I learned this the hard way after listening to three different versions in a row without noticing I'd confused the Valley of Shadows with the Land of Lost Resolves. They're separate locations in her geography, and the distinction matters for understanding the structure. Another practical thing: the book is available in a number of audiobook formats if you want to burn it to a drive or load it onto an old MP3 player. The LibriVox recordings are typically in MP3 or Vorbis. I usually convert to FLAC for archiving since the files are small enough that storage isn't a constraint. A complete recording runs about 90 to 110 minutes depending on the narrator's pace.
If you're looking for the official public domain links, the Project Gutenberg text is at standard public addresses and LibriVox hosts the recordings. There's no single "official" audio version because it's been in the public domain since before most modern distribution models existed. Anyone who wants to record it can, and they have. The best one is the one where you can actually hear every word without having to guess at what the narrator said.
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