With old Musaeus. Then strange flashes come,
Oracular glories, visionary gleams,
And the mask moves, not of itself, and sings.
[Footnote: _At the Sign of the Golden Shoe_.]

The best-known instance of such a belief is, of course, Browning's
appeal at the beginning of _The Ring and the Book_, that his dead
wife shall inspire his poetry.

One is tempted to surmise that many of our young poets, especially have
nourished a secret conviction that their genius has such an origin as
this. Let there be a deification of some poet who has aroused their
special enthusiasm,--a mysterious resemblance to his style in the works
which arise in their minds spontaneously, in moments of ecstasy,--what
is a more natural result than the assumption that their genius is, in
some strange manner, a continuation of his? [Footnote: Keats wrote to
Haydn that he took encouragement in the notion of some good
genius--probably Shakespeare--presiding over him. Swinburne was often
called Shelley reborn.] The tone of certain Shelley worshipers suggests
such a hypothesis as an account for their poems. Bayard Taylor seems to
be an exception when, after pleading that Shelley infuse his spirit into
his disciple's verses, he recalls himself, and concludes:

I do but rave, for it is better thus;
Were once thy starry nature given to mine,
In the one life which would encircle us
My voice would melt, my voice be lost in thine;
Better to bear the far sublimer pain
Of thought that has not ripened into speech.
To hear in silence Truth and Beauty sing