Philip Bourke Marston

At age three, Marston partially lost his vision due to the injudicious administration of belladonna (as a prophylactic against scarlet fever), potentially aggravated by an accidental blow.

For many years he maintained enough vision to see, in his own words, "the tree-boughs waving in the wind, the pageant of sunset in the west, and the glimmer of a fire upon the hearth;" and this dim, imperfect perception may have been more stimulating to his imagination than either perfect sight or total blindness.

His skills in verbal expression and melody were soon manifested in poems of remarkable merit for his years, and displaying a power of delineating the aspects of nature which, his affliction considered, seemed almost incomprehensible.

The death of his betrothed from rapid consumption, in November 1871, devastated him, and was the precursor of a series of calamities which may have produced the morbid element in his views of life and nature.

In 1882, the death of Marston's chief poetic ally and inspirer, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, was followed closely by that of another kindred spirit, James Thomson,[1] who was carried dying from his blind friend's rooms, where he had sought refuge from his latest miseries early in June of the same year.