ble to make out a plausible case for his theory that genius is a
disease which is always accompanied by physical stigmata.]

Obviously, if certain invalids possess a short-cut to their souls, as
Birge Harrison suggests, the nature of their complaint must be
significant. A jumping toothache would hardly be an advantage to a
sufferer in turning his thoughts to poesy. Since verse writers recoil
from the suggestion that dyspepsia is the name of their complaint, let
us ask them to explain its real character to us. To take one of our
earliest examples, what is the malady of William Lisles Bowles' poet, of
whom we learn,

Too long had sickness left her pining trace
With slow still touch on each decaying grace;
Untimely sorrow marked his thoughtful mien;
Despair upon his languid smile was seen.
[Footnote: _Monody on Henry Headley_.]

We can never know. But with Shelley, it becomes evident that
tuberculosis is the typical poet's complaint. Shelley was convinced that
he himself was destined to die of it. The irreverent Hogg records that
Shelley was also afraid of death from elephantiasis, [Footnote: T. J.
Hogg, _Life of Shelley_, p. 458.] but he keeps that affliction out
of his verse. So early as the composition of the _Revolt of Islam,_
Shelley tells us of himself, in the introduction,

Death and love are yet contending for their prey,

and in _Adonais_ he appears as

A power
Girt round with weakness.
* * * * *
A light spear ...
Vibrated, as the everbearing heart
Shook the weak hand that grasped it.

Shelley's imaginary poet, Lionel, gains in poetical sensibility as
consumption saps his strength:

You might see his colour come and go,
And the softest strain of music made
Sweet smiles, yet sad, arise and fade
Amid the dew of his tender eyes;
And the breath with intermitting flow
Made his pale lips quiver and part.
[Footnote: _Rosalind and Helen_.]

The deaths from tuberculosis of Kirke White [Footnote: See Kirke White,
_Sonnet to Consumption_.] and of Keats, added to Shelley's verse, so
affected the imagination of succeeding poets that for a time the cough
became almost ubiquitous in verse. In major poetry it appears for the
last time in Tennyson's _The Brook_, where the young poet hastens to
Italy, "too late," but in American verse it continued to rack the frame
of geniuses till the germ theory robbed it of romance and the
anti-tuberculosis campaign