Joseph Blanco White was born José María Blanco y Crespo on the 11th of July, 1775, in a house on a street corner in the old Jewish quarter of Seville, not far from the city's great cathedral. He would die sixty-five years later, in May 1841, in Liverpool, a city about as different from sun-bleached Andalusia as nineteenth-century Europe could offer, and the distance between those two places, geographic and spiritual,…
“I now rejoice at the approach of Sunday. This very morning while at Chapel, I had the strongest and deepest conviction that I had never witnessed anything so really sublime as the whole worship in which I was joining. In a word, the whole service is a reality.”
Neighbourhood:
Devotional Poets, Mystical & Spiritual Poets, Romantic Poets, Victorian Poets
Emotional landscape: Wonder, Sorrow, Spirituality
Achsa White Sprague was born on 17 November 1827 in Plymouth Notch, Vermont, a small mountain community whose austere beauty and close social fabric helped form her imagination. She died there on 6 July 1862, only thirty-four years old by the modern method of counting age, though many nineteenth-century notices described her as being in her thirty-fifth year. In the short interval between those dates, Sprague became…
“I have no desire to live merely for the sake of living, but I do desire to live to do good, to be useful to my fellow beings.”
Neighbourhood:
American Poets, Death & Mortality, Devotional Poets, Mystical & Spiritual Poets, Women Poets
Emotional landscape: Sorrow, Despair, Longing
