Blindness

After training in Egypt, Tom Skeyhill fought as a regimental signaller of the second (Victorian) Infantry Brigade of the Australian armed forces at Gallipoli from April 25, 1915, to May 8, when a shell explosion blinded him during an advance at Cape Helles. He was hospitalized at Al-Hayat, Helouin, Egypt, and then at the Base Hospital in Melbourne.

• Brownrigg, Jeff. "From Anzac Cove to Hollywood: Alvin C. York's Role in the Career of Tom Skeyhill." National Library of Australia News. 2007.

Margaret E. Sangster was born Margaret Munson on February 22, 1838, in New Rochelle, New York, and attended schools in Paterson, New Jersey, and Brooklyn, New York. She gave up an early career in writing when she married George Sangster in 1858. At his death in 1871, she returned to writing, becoming associate editor of Hearth and Home. In 1875, she edited "Christian at Work" and then the "Christian Intelligencer," in 1882 "Harper's Young People," and from 1889 to 1899 "Harper's Bazaar." She was a prolific writer of fiction and verse, famous for such poems as "Are the Children at Home?" A member of the Dutch Reformed Church, she died blind on June 4, 1912, in South Orange, New Jersey. She described her life in An Autobiography: From My Youth Up; Personal Reminiscences (1909).

• American Authors 1600-1900: A Biographical Dictionary of American Literature. Ed. Stanley J. Kunitz and Howard Haycraft. New York: H. W. Wilson, 1938. 669-70.
• The National Cyclopaedia of American Biography. Vol. VI. New York: James T. White, 1896. 169.
• Sangster, Margaret E. Poems of the Household. 1882.
• --. On the Road Home: Poems. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1893.
• --. Lyrics of Love of Hearth & Home and Field and Garden. New York: Fleming H. Revell, 1901.
• --. Cross Roads. New York: Frank Lovell, Bible House, 1919.

Father Tabb (John Banister Tabb) was born at "The Forrest," in Mattoax, near Richmond, Virginia, on March 22, 1845. Despite bad eyesight, he served on the Robert E. Lee steamer for the South in the Civil War and was imprisoned by the North in Point Lookout prison. After the war, he taught at St. Paul's Episcopal Church in Baltimore, and Racine College, Michigan. He left the Anglicanism and entered the Catholic Church September 8, 1872. Educated first at St. Charles College, in Ellicot City, Maryland, from 1872 to 1875, he taught for some years, 1877-78, at St. Peter's Boys' School, Richmond, and then at St. Charles College, until entering St. Mary's Seminary, Baltimore, in 1881. He graduated as a priest on December 20, 1884. From that year until his death, Father Tabb was chair of English at St. Charles College. (The College, burned down in 1911, relocated in Catonsville up to 1969, when St. Charles closed.) His amusing Bone Rules, or Skeleton of English Grammar was published in 1897. His lyrics appeared in eleven collections from 1882 to 1910. Beautifully crafted, accessible to everyone, Father Tabb's poems enjoyed a wide audience. He became totally blind in 1908. He died a confederate on November 19, 1909, and was buried in Hollywood Cemetery, Richmond, Virginia. His niece Jennie produced a loving biography and appreciation in 1922.

• Hayes, Kevin J. "Tabb, John Banister." American National Biography Online. American Council of Learned Societies: Oxford University Press, 2000.
• The Poetry of Father Tabb: John Banister Tabb. Ed. Francis A. Litz. New York: Dodd, Mead, and Co., 1927. PS 2965 A2 1928 Robarts Library
• "Tabb, John Banister." The National Cyclopaedia of American Biography. Vol. XIII. New York: James T. White, 1906. 249-50.
• Tabb, Jennie Masters. Father Tabb: His Life and Work. Boston, Mass.: Stratford, 1922. PS 2968 T3 1922 Robarts Library
• Tabb, John Banister. Bone Rules, or Skeleton of English Grammar. New York : Benziger Bros., 1897. PE 1113 .T33 1897 Robarts Library
• --. Child Verse. 1899.
• --. Later Lyrics. 1902.
• --
• Later Poems. 1910.
• --. Lyrics. Boston: Copeland and Day, 1897. PS 2967 .L9 Robarts Library
• --. An Octave to Mary 1893.
• --. Poems. 1882.
• --. Poems. 1894.
• --. Quips and Quiddits: Ques for the Qurious. Boston: Small Maynard, 1907. PS 2967 Q5 1907 Robarts Library
• --. The Rosary in Rhyme. Boston: Small Maynard.
• --. A Selection from the Verses of John B. Tabb. 1906.

Joseph Trumbull Stickney was born in Geneva on June 20, 1874, and grew up (to a height of six feet four inches) as his parents travelled widely ... Wiesbaden, Florence, Nice, London, and New York. After being educated by his father Austin at home in Latin and Greek, Trumbull entered Harvard University in 1891. He graduated magna cum laude in June 1895. The following eight years were spent studying for the degree of Doctorat ès Lettres at the Sorbonne in Paris. For this he wrote two theses, one on the letters of Ermolao Barbaro, a 15th-century ambassador to Rome, and the other on aphorisms in Greek verse. His Dramatic Verses was published in Boston in 1902, dedicated from Paris to his friend "Bay" (George) Lodge, who would co-edit Stickney's collected poems in 1905. In 1903 his second thesis was published as Les Sentences dans la Poésie Grècque: this won him the first Sorbonne Doctorat awarded to an American. Stickney then took on a position as instructor in Greek at Harvard in 1903 and travelled abroad in Greece from April to June that year. A brain tumor caused headaches and partial blindness from early in 1904 and led to his death in Boston on Oct. 11. He is buried in Hartford, Connecticut. For his biography, see Homage to Trumbull Stickney: Poems, edited by James Reeves and Seán Haldane (London: Heinemann, 1968), pp. 1-16 (New York Public Library shelfmark D-18-2147).

• Palmer, Roy. "Percy, Thomas (1729–1811)." Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Ed. H. C. G. Matthew and Brian Harrison. Oxford: OUP, 2004.