and again, in _Her Portrait_, he muses,

How should I gage what beauty is her dole,
Who cannot see her countenance for her soul,
As birds see not the casement for the sky.

It is through the eyes, of course, that the soul seems to shine most
radiantly. Through them, Rupert Brooke's friends recognized his poetical
nature,--through his

Dream dazzled gaze
Aflame and burning like a god in song.
[Footnote: W. W. Gibson, _To E. M., In Memory of Rupert Brooke_.]

Generally the poet is most struck by the abstracted expression that he
surprises in his eyes. Into it, in the case of later poets, there
probably enters unconscious imitation of Keats's gaze, that "inward
look, perfectly divine, like a Delphian priestess who saw visions."
[Footnote: The words are Benjamin Haydn's. See Sidney Colvin, _John
Keats_, p. 79.] In many descriptions, as of "the rapt one--the
heaven-eyed" [Footnote: Wordsworth, _On the Death of James Hogg_]
Coleridge, or of Edmund Spenser,

With haunted eyes, like starlit forest pools
[Footnote: Alfred Noyes, _Tales of the Mermaid Inn_.]

one feels the aesthetic possibilities of an abstracted expression. But
Mrs. Browning fails to achieve a happy effect. When she informs us of a
fictitious poet that