A light spear ...
Vibrated, as the everbeating heart
Shook the weak hand that grasped it.

Shelley's imaginary poet, Lionel, gains in poetical sensibility as
consumption saps his strength:

You might see his colour come and go,
And the softest strain of music made
Sweet smiles, yet sad, arise and fade
Amid the dew of his tender eyes;
And the breath with intermitting flow
Made his pale lips quiver and part.
[Footnote: _Rosalind and Helen._]


The deaths from tuberculosis of Kirke White [Footnote: See Kirke White,
_Sonnet to Consumption_.] and of Keats, added to Shelley's verse,
so affected the imagination of succeeding poets that for a time the
cough became almost ubiquitous in verse. In major poetry it appears for
the last time in Tennyson's _The Brook_, where the young poet hastens to
Italy, "too late," but in American verse it continued to rack the frame
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