beauty affords him a talisman revealing all the ugliness and
repulsiveness of evil. Even Byron had, in theory at least, a glimmering
sense of the anti-poetical character of evil, leading him to cry,

Tis not in
The harmony of things--this hard decree,
This ineradicable taint of sin,
This boundless upas, this all-blasting tree
Whose root is earth.
[Footnote: _Childe Harold_.]

If Byron could be brought to confess the inharmonious nature of evil, it
is obvious that to most poets the beauty of goodness has been
undeniable. In the eighteenth century Collins and Hughes wrote poems
wherein they elaborated Milton's argument for the unity of the good and
the beautiful.[Footnote: Collins, _Ode on the Poetical Character_;
John Hughes, _Ode on Divine Poetry_.] Among the romantic poets, the
Platonism of Coleridge,[Footnote: See his essay on Claudian, where he
says, "I am pleased to think that when a mere stripling I formed the
opinion that true taste was virtue, and that bad writing was bad
feeling."] Wordsworth, Shelley and Keats was unflinching in this
particular. The Brownings subscribed to the doctrine. Tennyson's
allegiance to scientific naturalism kept him in doubt for a time, but in
the end his faith in beauty triumphed, and he was ready to praise the
poet as inevitably possessing a nature exquisitely attuned to goodness.
One often runs across dogmatic expression of the doctrine in minor
poetry. W. A. Percy advises the poet,

O singing heart, think not of aught save song,
Beauty can do no wrong.