[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
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: it of course has left its
traces in the realm of poetry.
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