How should I gage what beauty is her dole, Who cannot see her countenance for her soul, As birds see not the casement for the sky. It is through the eyes, of course, that the soul seems to shine most radiantly. Through them, Rupert Brooke's friends recognized his poetical nature,--through his Dream dazzled gaze Aflame and burning like a god in song. [Footnote: W. W. Gibson, _To E. M., In Memory of Rupert Brooke_.] Generally the poet is most struck by the abstracted expression that he surprises in his eyes. Into it, in the case of later poets, there probably enters unconscious imitation of Keats's gaze, that "inward look, perfectly divine, like a Delphian priestess who saw visions." [Footnote: The words are Benjamin Haydn's. See Sidney Colvin, _John Keats_, p. 79.] In many descriptions, as of "the rapt one--the heaven-eyed" [Footnote: Wordsworth, _On the Death of James Hogg_] Coleridge, or of Edmund Spenser, With haunted eyes, like starlit forest pools [Footnote: Alfred Noyes, _Tales of the Mermaid Inn_.] one feels the aesthetic possibilities of an abstracted expression. But Mrs. Browning fails to achieve a happy effect. When she informs us of a fictitious poet that His steadfast eye burnt inwardly As burning out his soul, [Footnote: '_The Poet's Vow_.] we feel uneasily that someone should rouse him from his revery before serious damage is done. The idealistic poet weans his eyes from their pragmatic character in varying degree. Wordsworth, in poetic mood, seems to have kept them half closed.[Footnote: See _A Poet's Epitaph_, and _Sonnet: Most Sweet it is with Unuplifted Eyes_.] Mrs. Browning notes his Humble-lidded eyes, as one inclined Before the sovran-thought of his own mind. [Footnote: _On a Portrait of Wordsworth_.] Clough, also, impressed his poetic brothers by "his bewildered look, and his half-closed eyes." [Footnote: The quotation is by Longfellow. See J. I. Osborne, _Arthur Hugh Clough_.] But the poet sometimes goes farther, making it his ideal to See, no longer blinded with his eyes, [Footnote: See Rupert Brooke, _Not With Vain Tears_.] and may thus conceive of the master-poet as necessarily blind. Milton's noble lines on blindness in _Samson Agonistes_ have had much to do, undoubtedly, with the conceptions of later poets. Though blindness is seldom extended to other than actual poets, within the confines of verse having such a poet as subject it is referred to, often, as a partial explanation of genius. Thus Gray says of Milton, The living throne, the sapphire blaze Where angels tremble while they gaze He saw, but blasted with excess of light, Closed his eyes in endless night, [Footnote: _Progress of Poesy_.]