And lo! that hair is blanched with travel-heats of hell.
[Footnote: _A Captain of Song._]

In this connection one thinks at once of Shelley's prematurely graying
hair, reflected in description of 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.

The likeness of Sordello to Shelley [Footnote: Browning himself pointed
out a similarity between them, in the opening of Book 1.] is marked in
the ravages of his genius upon his flesh, so that at the climax of the
poem he, though still a young man, is gray and haggard and fragile.

Though ill-health is a handicap to him, the poet's subjection to
themutability that governs the mundane sphere is less important, some
persons would declare, in the matter of beauty and health than in the
matter of sex. Can a poetic spirit overcome the calamity of being cast