Yourselves shall trace (The delicate nostril swerving wide and fine, A sharp and restless lip, so well combine With that calm brow) a soul fit to receive Delight at every sense; you can believe Sordello foremost in the regal class Nature has broadly severed from her mass Of men, and framed for pleasure... * * * * * You recognize at once the finer dress Of flesh that amply lets in loveliness At eye and ear. Perhaps it is with the idea that the flesh may be shuffled off the more easily that poets are given "barely enough body to imprison the soul," as Mrs. Browning's biographer says of her. [Footnote: Mrs. Anna B. Jameson. George Stillman Milliard says of Mrs. Browning, "I have never seen a human frame which seemed so nearly a transparent veil for a celestial and immortal spirit." Shelley, Keats, Clough and Swinburne undoubtedly helped to strengthen the tradition.] The imaginary bard is so inevitably slender that allusion to "the poet's frame" needs no further description. Yet, once more, the poet may seem to be deliberately blinding himself to the facts. What of the father of English song, who, in the _Canterbury Tales_, is described by the burly host, He in the waast is shape as wel as I; This were a popet in an arm tenbrace For any woman, smal and fair of face? [Footnote: _Prologue to Sir Thopas_.] Even here, however, one can trace the modern aesthetic aversion to fat. Chaucer undoubtedly took sly pleasure in stressing his difference from the current conception of the poet, which was typified so well by the handsome young squire, who Coude songes make, and wel endyte. [Footnote: _Prologue_.] Such, at least, is the interpretation of Percy Mackaye, who in his play, _The Canterbury Pilgrims_, derives the heartiest enjoyment from Chaucer's woe lest his avoirdupois may affect Madame Eglantine unfavorably. The modern English poet who is oppressed by too, too solid flesh is inclined to follow Chaucer's precedent and take it philosophically. James Thomson allowed the stanza about himself, interpolated by his friends into the _Castle of Indolence_, to remain, though it begins with the line, A bard here dwelt, more fat than bard beseems. And in these days, the sentimental reader is shocked by Joyce Kilmer's callous assertion, "I am fat and gross.... In my youth I was slightly decorative. But now I drink beer instead of writing about absinthe." [Footnote: Letter to Father Daly, November, 1914.]