Can proportion of the outward part Move such affection in the inward mind That it can rob both sense and reason blind? Why do not then the blossoms of the field, Which are arrayed with much more orient hue And to the sense most daintie odors yield, Work like impression in the looker's view? [Footnote: _An Hymne in Honour of Beautie_.] Modern theorists, who would no doubt despise the quaintly idealistic mode of Spenser's expression, yet express much the same view in asserting that romantic excitement is a stimulus which keys all the senses to a higher pitch, thus dispersing one's amorousness over all creation. The love celebrated in Brooke's _The Great Lover_, they declare, cannot be compared with that of his more conventional love poems, simply because the one love is the cause of the other. Such heightened sensuous impressionability is celebrated in much of our most beautiful love poetry of to-day, notably in Sara Teasdale's. It may be that this intensity of perception engendered by love is its most poetical effect. Much verse pictures the poet as a flamelike spirit kindled by love to a preternaturally vivid apprehension of life for an instant, before love dies away, leaving him ashes. Again and again the analogy is pointed out between Shelley's spirit and the leaping flames that consumed his body. Josephine Preston Peabody's interpretation of Marlowe is of the same sort. In the drama of which Marlowe is the title-character, his fellow-dramatist, Lodge, is much worried when he learns of Marlowe's mad passion for a woman of the court. Thou art a glorious madman, Lodge exclaims, Born to consume thyself anon in ashes, And rise again to immortality. Marlowe replies, Oh, if she cease to smile, as thy looks say, What if? I shall have drained my splendor down To the last flaming drop! Then take me, darkness, And mirk and mire and black oblivion, Despairs that raven where no camp-fire is, Like the wild beasts. I shall be even blest To be so damned. Most often this conception of love's flamelike lightening of life for the poet is applied to Sappho. Many modern English poets picture her living "with the swift singing strength of fire." [Footnote: See Southey, _Sappho_; Mary Robinson (1758-1800), _Sappho and Phaon_; Philip Moren Freneau, _Monument of Phaon_; James Gates Percival, _Sappho_; Charles Kingsley, _Sappho_; Lord Houghton, _A Dream of Sappho_; Swinburne, _On the Cliffs_, _Anactoria_, _Sapphics_; Cale Young Rice, _Sappho's Death Song_; Sara Teasdale, _Sappho_; Percy Mackaye, _Sappho and Phaon_; Zoe Akins, _Sappho to a Swallow on the Ground_; James B. Kenyon, _Phaon Concerning Sappho_, _Sappho_ (1920); William Alexander Percy, _Sappho in Levkos_ (1920).] Swinburne, in _On the Cliffs_, claims this as the essential attribute of genius, when he cries to her for sympathy,