Anna Sewell, author of Black Beauty, b. 1820. “We call them dumb animals, and so they are, for they cannot tell us how they feel, but they do not suffer less because they have no words.” Black Beauty is, of course, the definitive horse story and the prime example of an argument in fiction for the humane treatment of animals. Anna Sewell was disabled at the age of fourteen when a sprained (or maybe broken?) ankle was treated improperly. For the rest of her life, she depended on a pony cart for transportation since she could no longer walk. She began writing Black Beauty when she was in her forties after a doctor told her she had only a year to live. The book actually took her more than five years to write, and she died a few months after its publication. Anna Sewell and her family were Quakers and believed in non-violence toward people and animals.
I wonder what Anna Sewell would say about Terri Schiavo?

“My doctrine is this, that if we see cruelty or wrong that we have the power to stop, and do nothing, we make ourselves sharers in the guilt.”
“Now I say that with cruelty and oppression it is everybody’s business to interfere when they see it.”

You can read Black Beauty on the web here and many other places.

Also, Vincent Van Gogh, artist, b. 1853. Go here to view all of Van Gogh’s paintings, letters, and other works online. You can also purchase a Van Gogh poster or read what critics think about Van Gogh’s work.
Paul Verlaine, French Decadent poet, b. 1844. I don’t read French, so I can’t really comment on his poetry, but he seems to have lived a decadent life. Somewhere in the middle of all the decadence, he converted to Catholicism, but the conversion may have been just another experiment in tasting all the sensatons that life had to offer.
I can’t think that either Van Gogh or Verlaine would have been easy or pleasant to know or to love.