ions as they are. But environment alone does
not account for a large per cent of our poet heroes, the tragedy of
whose lives most often results from a pathetic inability to recognize
evil motives when they are face to face with them.

Insistence upon the childlike nature of the poet is a characteristic
nineteenth century obsession. Such temperamentally diverse poets as Mrs.
Browning, [Footnote: See _A Vision of Poets_.] Swinburne [Footnote:
See _A New Year's Ode_.] and Francis Thompson [Footnote: See _Sister
Songs_.] agree in stressing this aspect of the poet's virtue. Perhaps it
has been overdone, and the resulting picture of the singer as "an
ineffectual angel, beating his bright wings in the void," is not so
noble a conception as was Milton's sterner one, but it lends to the
poet-hero a pathos that has had much to do with popularizing the type in
literature, causing the reader to exclaim, with Shelley,

The curse of Cain
Light on his head who pierced thy innocent breast
And scared the angel soul that was its earthly guest.

Of course the vogue of such a conception owes most to Shelley. All the
poets appearing in Shelley's verse, the heroes of _Rosalind and Helen,
The Revolt of Islam, Adonais, Epipsychidion_ and _Prince Athanase_,
share the disposition of the last-named one:

Naught of ill his heart could understand,
But pity and wild sorrow for the same.

It is obvious that all these singers are only veiled expositions of
Shelley's own character, as he understood it, and all enthusiastic
readers of Shelley's poetry have pictured an ideal poet who is
reminiscent of Shelley. Even a poet so different from him, in many
respects, as Browning, could not escape from the impress of Shelley's
character upon his ideal. Browning seems to have recognized fleeting
glimpses of Shelley in _Sordello_, and to have acknowledged them in
his apostrophe to Shelley at the beginning of that poem. Browning's
revulsion of feeling, after he discovered Shelley's abandonment of
Harriet, did not prevent him from holding to his early ideal of Shelley
as the typical poet. A poem by James Thomson, B.V., is characteristic of
later poets' notion of Shelley. The scene of the poem is laid in heaven.
Shelley, as the most compassionate of the angels, is chosen to go to the
earth, to right its evils. He comes to this world and lives with "the
saint's white purity," being

A voice of right amidst a world's foul wrong,
*