poetic gift. The skeptic may ask, What has the poet to do with his body?
since singers tell

us so repeatedly that their souls are aliens upon earth,
Clothed in flesh to suffer: maimed of wings to soar.
[Footnote: _The Centenary of Shelley_.]

as Swinburne phrases it. Yet, mysteriously, the artist's soul is said to
frame a tenement for its brief imprisonment that approximately expresses
it, so that it is only in the most beautiful bodies that we are to look
for the soul that creates beauty. Though poets of our time have not
troubled themselves much with philosophical explanations of the
phenomenon, they seem to concur in the Platonic reasoning of their
father Spenser, who argues,

So every spirit, as it is most pure,
And hath in it the more of heavenly light,
So it the fairer body doth procure
To habit in, and it more fairly dight
With cheerful grace, and amiable sight;
For of the soul the body form doth take,
For soul is form, and doth the body make.
[Footnote: _Hymn in Honour of Beauty_.]

What an absurd test! one is likely to exclaim, thinking of a swarthy
Sappho, a fat Chaucer, a bald Shakespeare, a runt Pope, a club-footed
Byron, and so on, almost _ad infinitum_. Would not a survey of notable
geniuses rather indicate that the poet's dreams arise because he is like
the sensitive plant of Shelley's allegory, which