If poets have given us no adequate body of data by which we may predict the birth of a genius, they have, on the other hand, given us most minute descriptions whereby we may recognize the husk containing the poetic gift. The skeptic may ask, What has the poet to do with his body? since singers tell us so repeatedly that their souls are aliens upon earth, Clothed in flesh to suffer: maimed of wings to soar. [Footnote: _The Centenary of Shelley_.] as Swinburne phrases it. Yet, mysteriously, the artist's soul is said to frame a tenement for its brief imprisonment that approximately expresses it, so that it is only in the most beautiful bodies that we are to look for the soul that creates beauty. Though poets of our time have not troubled themselves much with philosophical explanations of the phenomenon, they seem to concur in the Platonic reasoning of their father Spenser, who argues, So every spirit, as it is most pure, And hath in it the more of heavenly light, So it the fairer body doth procure To habit in, and it more fairly dight With cheerful grace, and amiable sight; For of the soul the body form doth take, For soul is form, and doth the body make. [Footnote: _Hymn in Honour of Beauty_.] What an absurd test! one is likely to exclaim, thinking of a swarthy Sappho, a fat Chaucer, a bald Shakespeare, a runt Pope, a club-footed Byron, and so on, almost _ad infinitum_. Would not a survey of notable geniuses rather indicate that the poet's dreams arise because he is like the sensitive plant of Shelley's allegory, which Desires what it hath not, the beautiful?[Footnote: _The Sensitive Plant_.] Spenser himself foresaw our objections and felt obliged to modify his pronouncement, admitting-- Yet oft it falls that many a gentle mind Dwells in deformed tabernacle drownd, Either by chance, against the course of kind, Or through unaptness of the substance found, Which it assumed of some stubborn ground That will not yield unto her form's direction, But is preformed with some foul imperfection. But the modern poet is not likely to yield his point so easily as does Spenser. Rather he will cast aside historical records as spurious, and insist that all genuine poets have been beautiful. Of the many poems on Sappho written in the last century, not one accepts the tradition that she was ill-favored, but restores a flower-like portrait of her from Alcaeus' line, Violet-weaving, pure, sweet-smiling Sappho. As for Shakespeare, here follows a very characteristic idealization of his extant portrait: A pale, plain-favored face, the smile where-of Is beautiful; the eyes gray, changeful, bright, Low-lidded now, and luminous as love, Anon soul-searching, ominous as night, Seer-like, inscrutable, revealing deeps Where-in a mighty spirit wakes or sleeps. [Footnote: C. L. Hildreth, _At the Mermaid_ (1889).]