]
If poets have given us no adequate body of data by which we may predict
the birth of a genius, they have, on the other hand, given us most
minute descriptions whereby we may recognize the husk containing the
poetic gift. The skeptic may ask, What has the poet to do with his body?
since singers tell
us so repeatedly that their souls are aliens upon earth,
Clothed in flesh to suffer: maimed of wings to soar.
[Footnote: _The Centenary of Shelley_.]
as Swinburne phrases it. Yet, mysteriously, the artist's soul is said to
frame a tenement for its brief imprisonment that approximately expresses
it, so that it is only in the most beautiful bodies that we are to look
for the soul that creates beauty. Though poets of our time have not
troubled themselves much with philosophical explanations of the
phenomenon, they seem to concur in the Platonic reasoning of their
father Spenser, who argues,
So every spirit, as it is most pure,
And hath in it the more of heavenly light,
So it the fairer body doth procure
To habit in, and it more fairly dight
With cheerful grace, and amiable sight;
For of the soul the body form doth take,
For soul is form, and doth the body make.
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