The deaths from tuberculosis of Kirke White [Footnote: See Kirke White, _Sonnet to Consumption_.] and of Keats, added to Shelley's verse, so affected the imagination of succeeding poets that for a time the cough became almost ubiquitous in verse. In major poetry it appears for the last time in Tennyson's _The Brook_, where the young poet hastens to Italy, "too late," but in American verse it continued to rack the frame of geniuses till the germ theory robbed it of romance and the anti-tuberculosis campaign drove it out of existence. Without the aid of physical causes, the exquisite sensitiveness of the poet's spirit is sometimes regarded as enough to produce illness. Thus Alexander Smith explains his sickly hero: More tremulous Than the soft star that in the azure East Trembles with pity o'er bright bleeding day Was his frail soul. [Footnote: _A Life Drama_.] Arnold, likewise, in _Thyrsis_, follows the poetic tradition in thus vaguely accounting for Clough's death: Some life of men unblest He knew, which made him droop, and filled his head. He went, his piping took a troubled sound Of storms that rage outside our happy ground. He could not wait their passing; he is dead. In addition, the intense application that genius demands leaves its mark upon the body. Recognition of this fact has doubtless been aided by Dante's portrait, which Wilde has repainted in verse: The calm, white brow, as calm as earliest morn, The eyes that flashed with passionate love and scorn, The lips that sang of Heaven and of Hell, The almond face that Giotto drew so well, The weary face of Dante.[Footnote: _Ravenna._] Rossetti repeats the tradition that the composition of the _Inferno_ so preyed upon Dante that the superstitious believed that he had actually visited Hades and whispered to one another, Behold him, how Hell's reek Has crisped his beard and singed his cheek. [Footnote: _Dante at Verona._] A similar note is in Francis Thompson's description of Coventry Patmore: And lo! that hair is blanched with travel-heats of hell. [Footnote: _A Captain of Song._] In this connection one thinks at once of Shelley's prematurely graying hair, reflected in description of his heroes harried by their genius into ill health. Prince Athanase is A youth who as with toil and travel Had grown quite weak and gray before his time. [Footnote: _Prince Athanase_, a fragment.] In _Alastor_, too, we see the hero wasting away until His limbs were lean; his scattered hair, Sered by the autumn of strange suffering, Sung dirges in the wind: his listless hand Hung like dead bone within his withered skin; Life, and the lustre that consumed it, shone As in a furnace burning secretly From his dark eyes alone.