the most decorous fancy was apt to run wild, his joyousness is never riotous : Wake now, my Love, awake; for it is time; All ready to her silver coche to clyme; And Phoebus 'gins to shew his glorious hed. Hark! how the cheerefull birds do chaunt their laies, The merry Larke hir mattins sings aloft ; The Thrush replyes; the Mavis descant playes; Ah! my deere Love, why doe ye sleep thus long, For they of joy and pleasance to you sing, That all the woods them answer, and theyr eccho ring.5 Beauty he passionately admired; beauty apparent to the senses-cheeks, lily white and rose red-hair, like golden wire-eyes, sparkling stars Comming to kisse her lyps-such grace I found--- Me seemd, I smelt a gardin of sweet flowres, It was his mistress from whom they breathed; and he revelled in them; yet delighting in all such transient charms chiefly as emblems of the inner lamp, immortally fair. It, from whose celestiall ray That light proceedes, which kindleth lovers fire, Unto her native planet shall retyre; For it is heavenly borne and cannot die, For when the soule, the which derived was, Which lights the world forth from his firie carre.7 So habitual indeed was it for him to seek the celestial in the earthly that, when we pass from the hymn in honour of Beauty visible to human sight, to hymns of heavenly love and heavenly beauty, we are not conscious of any essential change in the spirit of the treatment. Similarly we have no sense of heterogeneousness or abruptness, when a record Of my love's conquest, peerlesse beauties prise,8 elbows the grand Easter psalm : Most glorious Lord of lyfe! that, on this day, This joyous day, dear Lord, with joy begin ; And that thy love we weighing worthily, May likewise love thee for the same againe ; So let us love, deare Love, lyke as we ought; No poet has ever held a more exalted view of the dignity of his vocation. He proved it by his constant tendency to lift his subject, whatever it might be, from the dust to the stars. His poems, one and all, testify to a vast expenditure of care and thought. They require as much from their readers, and affection also. In truth it is sheer waste of mental effort to get him up for the purposes of polite conversation, or even as if to satisfy a Civil Service Examiner. He must-in any of his work-be read for delight in the harmony of diction and spirit; in the Faerie Queene also for that enjoyment, if possible, of the romance, which a child might still take, apart from the archaisms. I used, when a boy, to be told that Sir Frederick Thesiger, a powerful advocate, and afterwards Lord Chancellor, would every morning attune his mind to forensic oratory by committing to memory one or two of Spenser's stanzas. That is the proper temper; and the poet will reward it. Every poem he penned is a treasure house of imagery and of language. To understand the flexibility of English, its aptness for the expression of myriad turns of thought and feeling, all, but especially poets, should study him. Another distinctive feature of his Muse is the evenness, the pervading sweetness. Take your chance anywhere in the labyrinth of dulcet verse, redolent of more than Italian daintiness; and you will light upon none false. Not that, for sympathetic readers, there is a sense of stagnation. They are plodding through a thick undergrowth of strange deeds; suddenly a lark mounts through the stages of air, and is trilling overhead. Now and again an exquisite idea, scene, phrase, stands out; a gust of melody; oftener in the shorter poems than in the Faerie Queene, though occasionally there too. For instance, we pluck a flower like this in the garden of Acrasia: Thy joyous birdes shrouded in chearefull shade, The silver-sounding instruments did meet Absolute music! And it is not as if here and there some solitary islet of beauty emerged. A numerous company like to it are rising everywhere just above a flood of all but equal mellifluousness. Coral rocks with palm trees on them are seen for a moment, then disappear in the haze of an ever-rolling ocean, to be succeeded by others as lovely. Doubtless, as I have intimated, the strain, not of the harmony alone, but also of the fortitude, grace, and goodness, unrelieved by the pressure, equally exacting, of treachery, rapacity, and lust, goes far towards explaining the languor in the study of Spenser. In poetry, as in life, it is dangerous to overtax endurance. The poet much before the close of most of his honeyed lays has exhausted the receptibility of average minds. The effect upon the relation of many of us to himself personally is altogether different. The flood of unmixed essence of fancy which scares from attempts to breast it, offers a fascinating spectacle in the person of the master floating easily over the expanse. By a remarkable fate the forlorn, noble figure of the writer attracts almost in proportion as the writings chill. We prize immeasurably references in them to himself; to the silver-streaming Thames he loved, and the banks which his river hemmes, to Painted all with variable flowers, And all the meades adorned with dainty gemmes, merry London, my most kyndly nurse, That to me gave this life's first native course, Though from another place I take my name, An house of auncient fame; 12 to Ouse, which doth by Huntingdon and Cambridge flit, My mother Cambridge, whom as with a crowne With many a gentle Muse and many a learned Wit; to Ralegh's visit to him in the cooly shade Of the greene alders by the Mullaes shore,14 13 with its result, the manifestation to the world of The Faerie Queene-an epoch in literature. And to the friendship, as well of Sidney's mother, as of himself: Most gentle spirite breathed from above, Out of the bosom of the Makers blis, In whom all bountie and all vertuous love With treasure passing all this worldes worth Worthie of heaven it selfe, which brought it forth.15 Any rays thus shed upon his life and companionships are as welcome as they are delightful; but they are rare; and few trustworthy contemporary traditions and reminiscences exist to supplement them. His was not a temperament to gather about him a court of admirers who would have chronicled his words, and handed down the honour in which he was, or deserved to be, held. Even for an avowal of the vast poetical enterprise on which he had embarked, his confidence had to be forced by an accomplished stormer of hearts like 'the Shepheard of the Ocean', who, Whether allured with my pipes delight, Or thither led by chaunce, I know not right, |