. He would find, for example, Moore's
_Lines on a Squinting Poetess_, and Praed's _The Talented Man_. In the
latter verses the speaker says of her literary fancy,

He's hideous, I own it; but fame, Love,
Is all that these eyes can adore.
He's lame,--but Lord Byron was lame, Love,
And dumpy, but so is Tom Moore.

Still, rightly interpreted, such verse on poetasters is quite in line
with the poet's conviction that beauty and genius are inseparable. So,
likewise, is the more recent verse of Edgar Lee Masters, giving us the
brutal self-portrait of Minerva Jones, the poetess of Spoon River,

Hooted at, jeered at by the Yahoos of the street
For my heavy body, cock eye, and rolling walk,
[Footnote: _Spoon River Anthology_.]

for she is only a would-be poet, and the cry, "I yearned so for beauty!"
of her spirit, baffled by its embodiment, is almost insupportable.

Walt Whitman alludes to his face as "the heart's geography map," and
assures us,

Here the idea, all in this mystic handful wrapped,
[Footnote: _Out from Behind This Mask_.]

but one needs specific instructions for interpretation of the poetic
topography to which Whitman alludes. What are the poet's distinguishing
features?

Meditating on the subject, one finds his irreverent thoughts inevitably
wandering to hair, but in verse taken up with hirsute descriptions,
there is a false note. It makes itself felt in Mrs. Browning's picture
of Keats,

The real Adonis, with the hymeneal
Fresh vernal buds half sunk between
His youthful curls.
[Footnote: _A Vision of Poets_.]

It is obnoxious in Alexander Smith's portrait of his hero,

A lovely youth,
With dainty cheeks, and ringlets like a girl's.
[Footnote: _A Life Drama_.]

And in poorer verse it is unquotable. [Footnote: See Henry Timrod, _A
Vision of Poesy_ (1898); Frances Fuller, _To Edith May_ (1851);
Metta Fuller, _Lines to a Poetess_ (1851).] Someone has pointed out
that decadent poetry is always distinguished by over-insistence upon the
heroine's hair, and surely sentimental verse on poets is marked by the
same defect. Hair is doubtless essential to poetic beauty, but the
poet's strength, unlike Samson's, emphatically does not reside in it.

"Broad Homeric brows," [Footnote: See Wordsworth, _On the Death of
James Hogg_; Browning, _Sordello_, _By the Fireside_; Mrs. Browning,
_Aurora Leigh_; Principal Shairp, _Balliol Scholars_; Alfred Noyes,
_T