"I am wont day and night," says Milton, "to seek for this idea of the beautiful through all the forms and faces of things (for many are the shapes of things divine) and to follow it leading me on as with certain assured traces." [Footnote: Prose works, Vol. I, Letter VII, Symons ed.] The poet's feeling cannot possibly lead him astray when his sense of beauty affords him a talisman revealing all the ugliness and repulsiveness of evil. Even Byron had, in theory at least, a glimmering sense of the anti-poetical character of evil, leading him to cry, Tis not in The harmony of things--this hard decree, This ineradicable taint of sin, This boundless upas, this all-blasting tree Whose root is earth. [Footnote: _Childe Harold_.] If Byron could be brought to confess the inharmonious nature of evil, it is obvious that to most poets the beauty of goodness has been undeniable. In the eighteenth century Collins and Hughes wrote poems wherein they elaborated Milton's argument for the unity of the good and the beautiful.[Footnote: Collins, _Ode on the Poetical Character_; John Hughes, _Ode on Divine Poetry_.] Among the romantic poets, the Platonism of Coleridge,[Footnote: See his essay on Claudian, where he says, "I am pleased to think that when a mere stripling I formed the opinion that true taste was virtue, and that bad writing was bad feeling."] Wordsworth, Shelley and Keats was unflinching in this particular. The Brownings subscribed to the doctrine. Tennyson's allegiance to scientific naturalism kept him in doubt for a time, but in the end his faith in beauty triumphed, and he was ready to praise the poet as inevitably possessing a nature exquisitely attuned to goodness. One often runs across dogmatic expression of the doctrine in minor poetry. W. A. Percy advises the poet, O singing heart, think not of aught save song, Beauty can do no wrong. [Footnote: _Song_.] Again one hears of the singer, Pure must he be; Oh, blessed are the pure; for they shall hear Where others hear not; see where others see With a dazed vision, [Footnote: Henry Timrod, _A Vision of Poesy_.] and again, To write a poem, a man should be as pure As frost-flowers. [Footnote: T. L. Harris, _Lyrics of the Golden Age_.] Only recently a writer has pictured the poet as one who Lived beyond men, and so stood Admitted to the brotherhood Of beauty. [Footnote: Madison Cawein, _The Dreamer of Dreams_.] It is needless to run through the list of poet heroes. Practically all of them look to a single standard to govern them aesthetically and morally. They are the sort of men whom Watts-Dunton praises, Whose poems are their lives, whose souls within Hold naught in dread save Art's high conscience bar, Who know how beauty dies at touch of sin. [Footnote: _The Silent Voices_.]