h_.]

Clough, also, impressed his poetic brothers by "his bewildered look, and
his half-closed eyes." [Footnote: The quotation is by Longfellow. See J.
I. Osborne, _Arthur Hugh Clough_.]

But the poet sometimes goes farther, making it his ideal to

See, no longer blinded with his eyes,
[Footnote: See Rupert Brooke, _Not With Vain Tears_.]

and may thus conceive of the master-poet as necessarily blind. Milton's
noble lines on blindness in _Samson Agonistes_ have had much to do,
undoubtedly, with the conceptions of later poets. Though blindness is
seldom extended to other than actual poets, within the confines of verse
having such a poet as subject it is referred to, often, as a partial
explanation of genius. Thus Gray says of Milton,

The living throne, the sapphire blaze
Where angels tremble while they gaze
He saw, but blasted with excess of light,
Closed his eyes in endless night,
[Footnote: _Progress of Poesy_.]

and most other poems on Milton follow this fancy.[Footnote: See John
Hughes, _To the Memory of Milton_; William Lisle Bowles, _Milton in
Age_; Bulwer Lytton, _Milton_; W. H. Burleigh, _The Lesson_; R. C.
Robbins, _Milton_.] There is a good deal of verse on P. B. Marston,
also, concurring with Rossetti's assertion that we may

By the darkness of thine eyes discern
How piercing was the light within thy soul.
[Footnote: See Rossetti, _P. B. Marston_; Swinburne,
_Transfiguration, Marston, Light_; Watts-Dunton, _A Grave by the
Sea_.]

Then, pre-eminently, verse on Homer is characterized by such an
assertion as that of Keats,

There is a triple sight in blindness keen.
[Footnote: See Keats, _Sonnet on Homer_, Landor, _Homer, Laertes,
Agatha_; Joyce Kilmer, _The Proud Poet, Vision_.]

Though the conception is not found extensively in other types of verse,
one finds an admirer apostrophizing Wordsworth,

Thou that, when first my quickened ear
Thy deeper harmonies might hear,
I imaged to myself as old and blind,
For so were Milton and Maeonides,
[Footnote: Wm. W. Lord, _Wordsworth_ (1845).]

and at least one American writer, Richard Gilder, ascribes blindness to
his imaginary artists.[Footnote: See _The Blind Poet_, and _Lost_. See
also Francis Carlin _Blind O'Cahan_ (1918.)]

But the old, inescapable contradiction in aesthetic philosophy crops up
here. The poet is concerned only with ideal beauty, yet the way to it,
for him, must be through sensuous beauty. So, as oppos