Meditating on the subject, one finds his irreverent thoughts inevitably wandering to hair, but in verse taken up with hirsute descriptions, there is a false note. It makes itself felt in Mrs. Browning's picture of Keats,
The real Adonis, with the hymeneal
Fresh vernal buds half sunk between
His youthful curls.
[Footnote: A Vision of Poets.]
It is obnoxious in Alexander Smith's portrait of his hero,
A lovely youth,
With dainty cheeks, and ringlets like a girl's.
[Footnote: A Life Drama.]
And in poorer verse it is unquotable. [Footnote: See Henry Timrod, A Vision of Poesy (1898); Frances Fuller, To Edith May (1851); Metta Fuller, Lines to a Poetess (1851).] Someone has pointed out that decadent poetry is always distinguished by over-insistence upon the heroine's hair, and surely sentimental verse on poets is marked by the same defect. Hair is doubtless essential to poetic beauty, but the poet's strength, unlike Samson's, emphatically does not reside in it.
"Broad Homeric brows," [Footnote: See Wordsworth, On the Death of James Hogg; Browning, Sordello, By the Fireside; Mrs. Browning, Aurora Leigh; Principal Shairp, Balliol Scholars; Alfred Noyes, Tales of the Mermeid Inn.] poets invariably possess, but the less phrenological aspect of their beauty is more stressed. The differentiating mark of the singer's face is a certain luminous quality, as of the soul shining through. Lamb noticed this peculiarity of Coleridge, declaring, "His face when he repeats his verses hath its ancient glory; an archangel a little damaged." [Footnote: E. V. Lucas, The Life of Charles Lamb, Vol. I., p. 500.] Francis Thompson was especially struck by this phenomenon. In lines To a Poet Breaking Silence, he asserts,
Yes, in this silent interspace
God sets his poems in thy face,
and again, in Her Portrait, he muses,
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