n
Outworn Sappho;_ Paul Laurence Dunbar, _The Poet;_ Theodore Watts-Dunton,
_The Octopus of the Golden Isles;_ Francis Ledwidge, _The Coming
Poet._] Shelley is particularly wrought up on the subject, and in _The
Woodman and the Nightingale_ expresses through an allegory the murderous
designs of the public.

A salient example of more vicarious indignation is Mrs. Browning, who
exposes the world's heartlessness in a poem called _The Seraph and the
Poet._ In _A Vision of Poets_ she betrays less indignation, apparently
believing that experience of undeserved suffering is essential to the
maturing of genius. In this poem the world's greatest poets are
described:

Where the heart of each should beat,
There seemed a wound instead of it,
From whence the blood dropped to their feet.

The young hero of the poem, to whom the vision is given, naturally
shrinks from the thought of such suffering, but the attendant spirit
leads him on, nevertheless, to a loathsome pool, where there are bitter
waters,

And toads seen crawling on his hand,
And clinging bats, but dimly scanned,
Full in his face their wings expand.
A paleness took the poet's cheek;
"Must I drink here?" He seemed to seek
The lady's will with utterance meek:
"Ay, ay," she said, "it so must be:"
(And this time she spoke cheerfully)
Behooves thee know world's cruelty.

The modern poet is able to bring forward many historical names by which
to substantiate the charges of cruelty which he makes against society.
From classic Greece he names Aeschylus [Footnote: R. C. Robbins, _Poems
of Personality_ (1909); Cale Young Rice, _Aeschylus._] and Euripides.
[Footnote: Bulwer Lytton, _Euripides;_ Browning, _Balaustion's
Adventure;_ Richard Burton, _The First Prize._] From Latin writers our
poets have chosen as favorite martyr Lucan, "by his death approved."
[Footnote: _Adonais._ See also Robert Bridges, _Nero._] Of the great
renaissance poets, Shakespeare alone has usually been considered exempt
from the general persecution, though Richard Garnett humorously
represents even him as suffering triple punishment,--flogging,
imprisonment and exile,--for his offense against Sir Thomas Lucy,
aggravated by poetical temperament. [Footnote: See _Wm. Shakespeare,
Pedagogue and Poacher_, a drama (1904).] Of all renaissance poets Dante
[Footnote: See G. L. Raymond, _Dante_; Sarah King Wiley, _Dante and
Beatrice_; Rossetti, _Dante at Verona_; Oscar Wilde, _Ravenna