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,