His steadfast eye burnt inwardly
As burning out his soul,
[Footnote: '_The Poet's Vow_.]

we feel uneasily that someone should rouse him from his revery before
serious damage is done.

The idealistic poet weans his eyes from their pragmatic character in
varying degree. Wordsworth, in poetic mood, seems to have kept them half
closed.[Footnote: See _A Poet's Epitaph_, and _Sonnet: Most Sweet
it is with Unuplifted Eyes_.] Mrs. Browning notes his

Humble-lidded eyes, as one inclined
Before the sovran-thought of his own mind.
[Footnote: _On a Portrait of Wordsworth_.]

Clough, also, impressed his poetic brothers by "his bewildered look, and
his half-closed eyes." [Footnote: The quotation is by Longfellow. See J.
I. Osborne, _Arthur Hugh Clough_.]

But the poet sometimes goes farther, making it his ideal to

See, no longer blinded with his eyes,
[Footnote: See Rupert Brooke, _Not With Vain Tears_.]

and may thus conceive of the master-poet as necessarily blind. Milton's
noble lines on blindness in _Samson Agonistes_ have had much to do,
undoubtedly, with the conceptions of later poets. Though blindness is
seldom extended to other than actual poets, within the confines of verse