Wine and women and song, Three things garnish our way: Yet is day overlong. Three things render us strong, Vine-leaves, kisses and bay. Yet is day overlong. Since the decadents themselves must admit that delight in sin kills, rather than nurtures, sensibility, a popular defense of their practices is to the effect that sin, far from being sought consciously, is an inescapable result of the artist's abandonment to his feelings. Moreover it is useful, they assert, in stirring up remorse, a very poetic feeling, because it heightens one's sense of the beauty of holiness. This view attained to considerable popularity during the Victorian period, when sentimental piety and worship of Byron were sorely put to it to exist side by side. The prevalence of the view that remorse is the most reliable poetic stimulant is given amusing evidence in the _Juvenalia_ of Tennyson [Footnote: See _Poems of Two Brothers_.]and Clough, [Footnote: See _An Evening Walk in Spring_.] wherein these youths of sixteen and seventeen, whose later lives were to prove so innocuous, represent themselves as racked with the pangs of repentance for mysteriously awful crimes. Mrs. Browning, an excellent recorder of Victorian public opinion, ascribed a belief in the deplorable but inevitable conjunction of crime and poetry to her literary friends, Miss Mitford and Mrs. Jameson. Their doctrine, Mrs. Browning wrote, "is that everything put into the poetry is taken out of the man and lost utterly by him." [Footnote: See letters to Robert Browning, February 17, 1846; May 1,1846.] Naturally, Mrs. Browning wholly repudiated the idea, and Browning concurred in her judgment. "What is crime," he asked, "which would have been prevented but for the 'genius' involved in it?--Poor, cowardly, miscreated creatures abound--if you could throw genius into their composition, they would become more degraded still, I suppose." [Footnote: Letter to Elizabeth Barrett, April 4, 1846.] Burns has been the great precedent for verse depicting the poet as yearning for holiness, even while his importunate passions force him into evil courses. One must admit that in the verse of Burns himself, a yearning for virtue is not always obvious, for he seems at times to take an unholy delight in contemplating his own failings, as witness the _Epistle to Lapraik_, and his repentance seems merely perfunctory, as in the lines, There's ae wee faut they whiles lay to me, I like the lassies--Gude forgie me. But in _The Vision_ he accounts for his failings as arising from his artist's temperament. The muse tells him, I saw thy pulses' maddening play, Wild, send thee Pleasure's devious way, And yet the light that led astray Was light from Heaven. And in _A Bard's Epitaph_ he reveals himself as the pathetic, misguided poet who has been a favorite in verse ever since his time.