with the poet's conviction that beauty and genius are inseparable. So,
likewise, is the more recent verse of Edgar Lee Masters, giving us the
brutal self-portrait of Minerva Jones, the poetess of Spoon River,

Hooted at, jeered at by the Yahoos of the street
For my heavy body, cock eye, and rolling walk,
[Footnote: _Spoon River Anthology_.]

for she is only a would-be poet, and the cry, "I yearned so for beauty!"
of her spirit, baffled by its embodiment, is almost insupportable.

Walt Whitman alludes to his face as "the heart's geography map," and
assures us,

Here the idea, all in this mystic handful wrapped,
[Footnote: _Out from Behind This Mask_.]

but one needs specific instructions for interpretation of the poetic
topography to which Whitman alludes. What are the poet's distinguishing
features?

Meditating on the subject, one finds his irreverent thoughts inevitably
wandering to hair, but in verse taken up with hirsute descriptions,
there is a false note. It makes itself felt in Mrs. Browning's picture
of Keats,

The real Adonis, with the hymeneal
Fresh vernal buds half sunk between
His youthful curls.
[Footnote: _A Vision of Poets_.]