of geniuses till the germ theory robbed it of romance and the
anti-tuberculosis campaign drove it out of existence.

Without the aid of physical causes, the exquisite sensitiveness of the
poet's spirit is sometimes regarded as enough to produce illness. Thus
Alexander Smith explains his sickly hero:

More tremulous
Than the soft star that in the azure East
Trembles with pity o'er bright bleeding day
Was his frail soul.
[Footnote: _A Life Drama_.]

Arnold, likewise, in _Thyrsis_, follows the poetic tradition in
thus vaguely accounting for Clough's death: his heroes harried by their
genius into ill health. Prince Athanase is

A youth who as with toil and travel
Had grown quite weak and gray before his time.
[Footnote: _Prince Athanase_, a fragment.]

In _Alastor_, too, we see the hero wasting away until

His limbs were lean; his scattered hair,
Sered by the autumn of strange suffering,
Sung dirges in the wind: his listless hand
Hung like dead bone within his withered skin;
Life, and the lustre that consumed it, shone
As in a furnace burning secretly
From his dark eyes alone.