Sightless Poets.
There were several blind poets, of whom Milton is, of course, the most famous; he became totally blind in May, 1652, being then forty-one years of age. A large number of his works, "Paradise Lost" among others, were written after his misfortune. He lived in darkness for twenty-two years, dying November 8, 1674.
Homer was known as "the blind bard of Chio's rocky isle," but he did not become blind until late in life—if indeed he was a real person at all.
Another blind poet of note was Luigi Grotto, an Italian, known as "Il Cieco d'Adria." He lived from 1541 to 1585.
Giovanni Gonelli (1610-1664) was a noted Tuscan sculptor, and much of his work may be seen to-day. Though totally blind, he made admirable likenesses, and his portrait bust of Pope Urban VIII is very celebrated.
In more modern times we have the late Henry Fawcett, of Salisbury, England. Born in 1833, he was graduated from Cambridge in 1856. In 1858 he became totally blind, through an accident while hunting. This terrible misfortune at the outset of a promising career would have been enough to daunt most men, but in spite of it Fawcett soon became an authority on economic and political subjects, and in 1863 he was made a professor of political economy at the University of Cambridge. He was elected to the British House of Commons, and in 1880 he entered the cabinet as postmaster-general of England, in which position he proved himself an active and efficient minister. He died in 1884.
Another notable modern example is the great yacht designer, John B. Herreshoff. Although he became blind at fifteen, he has built up and managed the successful business that bears his name—the Herreshoff Manufacturing Company, builders of several defenders of the America Cup. In spite of his blindness, he is perfectly at home in his shops or on board ship.
THE OWNERS OF THE SOIL.
By EDWARD EVERETT.
The man who stands upon his own soil, who feels that, by the law of the land in which he lives, he is the rightful and exclusive owner of the land which he tills, feels more strongly than another the character of a man as the lord of an inanimate world. Of this great and wonderful sphere, which, fashioned by the hand of God, and upheld by His power, is rolling through the heavens, a part is his—his from the center to the sky! It is the space on which the generation before moved in its round of duties, and he feels himself connected by a visible link with those who follow him, and to whom he is to transmit a home.
Perhaps his farm has come down to him from his fathers. They have gone to their last home; but he can trace their footsteps over the scenes of his daily labors. The roof which shelters him was reared by those to whom he owes his being. Some interesting domestic tradition is connected with every enclosure. The favorite fruit-tree was planted by his father's hand. He sported in boyhood beside the brook which still winds through the meadow. Through the field lies the path to the village school of earlier days. He still hears from the window the voice of the Sabbath-bell, which called his fathers to the house of God; and near at hand is the spot where his parents lay down to rest, and where, when his time has come, he shall be laid by his children.
These are the feelings of the owners of the soil. Words cannot paint them—gold cannot buy them; they flow out of the deepest fountains of the heart; they are the very life-springs of a fresh, healthy, and generous national character.
Edward Everett was an American of culture, of elegance, of scholarship, at a time when culture and elegance and scholarship were not commonly met with in America. He was clergyman, professor, public lecturer, diplomat, statesman; he held positions as eminent yet as separated as president of Harvard College and Secretary of State, and at other times between his birth, in 1794, and his death, in 1865, he was editor of the North American Review, member of Congress and of the Senate, Governor of Massachusetts, minister to Great Britain. This is the man who pronounced so moving a panegyric on the life of the farmer.
How They Got On In The World.
Brief Biographies of Successful Men Who Have Passed Through
the Crucible of Small Beginnings and Won Out.
Compiled and edited for The Scrap Book.