In the usual description, however, there is none of this dynamic force. Womanliness, above all, and sympathy, poets ascribe to their mothers. [Footnote: See Beattie, _The Minstrel_; Wordsworth, _The Prelude_; Cowper, _Lines on his Mother's Picture_; Swinburne, _Ode to his Mother_; J. G. Holland, _Kathrina_; William Vaughan Moody, _The Daguerreotype_; Anna Hempstead Branch, _Her Words_.] A little poem by Sara Teasdale, _The Mother of a Poet_, gives a poetical explanation of this type of woman, in whom all the turbulence of the poet's spiritual inheritance is hushed before it is transmitted to him. Such a mother as Byron's, while she appeals to certain novelists as a means of intensifying the poet's adversities, [Footnote: See H. E. Rives, _The Castaway_ (1904); J. D. Bacon, _A Family Affair_ (1900).] is not found in verse. One might almost conclude that poets consider their maternal heritage indispensable. Very seldom is there such a departure from tradition as making the father bequeather of the poet's sensitiveness. [Footnote: _A Ballad in Blank Verse_, by John Davidson, is a rare exception.] The inheritance of a specific literary gift is almost never insisted upon by poets, [Footnote: See, however, Anna Hempstead Branch, _Her Words_.] though some of the verse addressed to the child, Hartley Coleridge, possibly implies a belief in such heritage. The son of Robert and Mrs. Browning seems, strangely enough, considering his chance of a double inheritance of literary ability, not to have been the subject of versified prophecies of this sort. One expression by a poet of belief in heredity may, however, detain us. At the beginning of Viola Meynell's career, it is interesting to notice that as a child she was the subject of speculation as to her inheritance of her mother's genius. It was Francis Thompson, of course, who, musing on Alice Meynell's poetry, said to the little Viola, If angels have hereditary wings, If not by Salic law is handed down The poet's laurel crown, To thee, born in the purple of the throne, The laurel must belong. [Footnote: _Sister Songs_.] But these lines must not be considered apart from the fanciful poem in which they grow. What have poets to say on the larger question of their social inheritance? This is a subject on which, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, at least, poets should have had ideas, and the varying rank given to their lyrical heroes is not without significance. The renaissance idea, that the nobleman is framed to enjoy, rather than to create, beauty,--that he is the connoisseur rather than the genius,--seems to have persisted in the eighteenth century, and at the beginning of the romantic movement to have combined with the new exaltation of the lower classes to work against the plausible view that the poet is the exquisite flowering of the highest lineage.