drove it out of existence.

Without the aid of physical causes, the exquisite sensitiveness of the
poet's spirit is sometimes regarded as enough to produce illness. Thus
Alexander Smith explains his sickly hero:

More tremulous
Than the soft star that in the azure East
Trembles with pity o'er bright bleeding day
Was his frail soul.
[Footnote: _A Life Drama_.]

Arnold, likewise, in _Thyrsis_, follows the poetic tradition in
thus vaguely accounting for Clough's death:

Some life of men unblest
He knew, which made him droop, and filled his head.
He went, his piping took a troubled sound
Of storms that rage outside our happy ground.
He could not wait their passing; he is dead.

In addition, the intense application that genius demands leaves its mark
upon the body. Recognition of this fact has doubtless been aided by
Dante's portrait, which Wilde has repainted in verse:

The calm, white brow, as calm as earliest morn,
The eyes that flashed with passionate love and scorn,
The lips that sang of Heaven and of Hell,
The almond face that Giotto drew so well,
The weary face of Dante.[Footnote: _Ravenna._]

Rossetti repeats the tradition that the composition of the
_Inferno_ so preyed upon Dante that the superstitious believed that
he had actually visited Hades and whispered to one another,

Behold him, how Hell's reek
Has crisped his beard and singed his cheek.
[Footnote: _Dante at Verona._]

A similar note is in Francis Thompson's description of Coventry Patmore:

And lo! that hair is blanched with travel-heats of hell.
[Footnote: _A Captain of Song._]

In this connection one thinks at once of Shelley's prematurely graying
hair, reflected in description of his heroes harried by their
genius into ill health. Prince Athanase is

A youth who as with toil and travel
Had grown quite weak and gray before his time.
[Footnote: _Prince Athanase_, a fragment.]

In _Alastor_, too, we see the hero wasting away until

His limbs were lean; his scattered hair,
Sered by the autumn of strange suffering,
Sung dirges in the wind: his listless hand
Hung like dead bone within his withered skin;
Life, and the lustre that consumed it, shone
As in a furnace burning secretly
From his dark eyes alone.

The likeness of Sordello to Shelley [Footnote: Browning himself pointed
out a similarity between them, in the opening of Book I.] is marked in
the ravages of his genius upon his