Born, in London, 1552 (?). Early education at Merchant Taylor’s School. To Pembroke Hall, Cambridge, as Sizar, 20 May 1569; B.A., 16 Jan. 1573; M.A., 26 June 1576. Settled in London, 1578. Secretary to Lord-Lieut. of Ireland, 1580. Received grant of land in co. Cork, 1586. Clerk of Council of Munster, 1588. Visited by Sir Walter Raleigh, 1589; to England with him, to be presented at Court. Lived in Ireland, 1591–95. Married (Elizabeth Boyle?), 1595. Sheriff of co. Cork, 1598. Died, in London, 16 Jan. 1599. Buried in Westminster Abbey. Works: “The Shepheardes Calendar,” 1579; “Three Proper, and Wittie, Familiar Letters: lately passed between Two Universitie Men” (anon.), 1580; “The Faerie Queene,” bks. i.–iii., 1590; bks. iv.–vi., 1596; “Muiopotmos,” 1590; “Complaints,” 1591; “Prosopopoia,” 1591; “Teares of the Muses,” 1591; “Daphnaida,” 1591; “Amoretti and Epithalamion,” 1595; “Colin Clout’s Come Home Againe,” 1595; “Prothalamion,” 1596; “Foure Hymnes, etc.,” 1596; “A View of the State of Ireland,” 1596. Collected Works: ed. by J. Aikin (5 vols.), 1842; ed. by A. B. Grosart (9 vols.), 1882–84.

Personal

	If I should now forget, or not remember thee,
	Thou, Spencer, might’st a foul rebuke or shame impute to me;
	For I, to open shew did love thee passing well,
	And thou wert he at parture whom I loathed to bid farewell;
	And, as I went thy friend, so I continue still;
	No better proof thou canst than this desire of true good-will.
	I do remember well, when needs I should away,
	And that the post would license us no longer time to stay,
	Thou wrung’st me by the fist, and, holding fast my hand,
	Did’st crave of me to send thee news, and how I liked the land.

  Lady Cope is dead, and Spenser the Poet, who lately came from Ireland, died at Westminster last Saturday.

	The thrice three Muses mourning for the death
	Of Learning, late deceased in beggary.

  When hir Majestie had giuen order that Spenser should haue a reward for his poems, but Spenser could haue nothing, he presented hir with these verses:

	It pleased your Grace vpon a tyme
	To graunt me reason for my ryme,
	But from that tyme vntill this season
	I heard of neither ryme nor reason.
	(Touse.)

  Edmund Spencer, of London, far the first of the English Poets of our age, as his poems prove, written under the smile of the Muses, and with a genius destined to live. He died prematurely in the year of salvation 1598, and is buried near Geoffrey Chaucer, who was the first most happily to set forth poetry in English writing: and on him were written these epitaphs:—

	Here nigh to Chaucer Spenser lies; to whom
	In genius next he was, as now in tomb.

	Here nigh to Chaucer, Spenser, stands thy hearse,
	Still nearer standst thou to him in thy verse.
	Whilst thou didst live, lived English poetry;
	Now thou art dead, it fears that it shall die.

  That the Irish having rob’d Spenser’s goods, and burnt his house and a little child new born, he and his wyfe escaped; and after, he died for lake of bread in King Street, and refused 20 pieces sent to him by my Lord of Essex, and said, He was sorrie he had no time to spend them. That in that paper S. W. Raughly had of the Allegories of his Fayrie Queen, by the Blating Beast the Puritans were understood, by the false Duessa the Q. of Scots.

	How they from my deere Spenser stood alooff
	When verbale drones, of vertuous merit scant,
	Suffred that gentle poet die of want!
	One onlie, knowinge generositie,
	And finding he n’oold crave for modestie,
	Him sent in greatest sicknes crownes good store:
	So Robert Essex did, honor’s decore.
	Nathles, of pininge griefe and wante’s decaie,
	Hee much thoncke that stowt Earle, that thus gan saie,
	The medcine comes too late to the patient:
	Tho died.

  Edmund Spenser, a Londoner by birth, and a scholar also of the University of Cambridge, born under so favourable an aspect of the Muses that he surpassed all the English Poets of former times, not excepting Chaucer himself, his fellow-citizen. But by a fate which still follows Poets, he always wrestled with poverty, though he had been secretary to the Lord Grey, Lord Deputy of Ireland. For scarce had he there settled himself into a retired privacy and got leisure to write, when he was by the rebels thrown out of his dwelling, plundered of his goods, and returned into England a poor man, where he shortly after died and was interred at Westminster, near to Chaucer, at the charge of the Earl of Essex, his hearse being attended by poets, and mournful elegies and poems with the pens that wrote them thrown into his tomb.

  How far these collections may conduce to the knowledge of the antiquities and state of this land, let the fit reader judge: yet something I may not passe by touching Mr. Edmund Spenser and the worke it selfe, lest I should seeme to offer injury to his worth, by others so much celebrated. Hee was borne in London of an ancient and noble family, and brought up in the Universitie of Cambridge, where (as the fruites of his after labours doe manifest) he mispent not his time. After this he became secretary to Arthur Lord Grey of Wilton, Lord Deputy of Ireland, a valiant and worthy governour, and shortly after, for his services to the Crowne, he had bestowed upon him by Queene Elizabeth, 3,000 acres of land in the countie of Corke. There he finished the latter part of that excellent poem of his “Faery Queene,” which was soone after unfortunately lost by the disorder and abuse of his servant, whom he had sent before him into England, being then a rebellibus (as Camden’s words are) è laribus ejectus et bonis spoliatus. He deceased at Westminster in the year 1599 (others have it wrongly 1598), soon after his return into England, and was buried according to his own desire in the collegiat church there, neere unto Chaucer whom he worthily imitated.

	Witnesse our Colin; whom though all the Graces,
	And all the Muses nurst; whose well-taught song
	Parnassus’ self, and Glorian embraces,
	And all the learn’d, and all the shepherds’ throng;
	Yet all his hopes were crost, all suits deni’d;
	Discourag’d, scorn’d, his writings vilifi’d:
	Poorly—poore man—he liv’d; poorly—poore man—he di’d.

  Grandson of Edmund Spenser, from whom an estate of lands in the barony of Fermoy, in the county of Cork, descended on him;… that the said estate hath been lately given out to the soldiers, in satisfaction of their arrears;… that his grandfather was that Spenser who, by his writings touching the reduction of the Irish to civility, brought on him the odium of that nation; and for those works and his other good services, Queen Elizabeth conferred on him that estate which the said William Spenser now claims. We have also been informed that the gentleman is of a civil conversation, and that the extremity his wants have brought him unto have not prevailed over him to put him upon indiscreet or evil practices for a livelihood. If, upon inquiry, you shall find his case to be such; we judge it just and reasonable, and do therefore desire and authorize you, that he be forthwith restored to his estate; and that reprisal lands be given to the soldiers elsewhere; in the doing whereof our satisfaction will be greater by the continuation of that estate to the issue of his grandfather, for whose eminent deserts and services to the Commonwealth that estate was first given him.

  There passeth a story commonly told and believed, that Spenser presenting his poems to queen Elizabeth, she, highly affected therewith, commanded the Lord Cecil, her Treasurer, to give him an hundred pound; and when the Treasurer (a good Steward of the Queen’s money) alledged that sum was too much; “Then give him,” quoth the Queen, “What is reason;” to which the Lord consented; but was so busied, belike, about matters of higher concernment, that Spenser received no reward; whereupon he presented this petition in a small piece of paper to the Queen in her Progress:

	“I was promis’d on a time,
	To have reason for my ryme:
	From that time unto this season,
	I receiv’d nor rhyme nor reason.”

Hereupon the Queen gave strict order (not without some check to her Treasurer), for the present payment of the hundred pounds she first intended unto him. He afterwards went over into Ireland, Secretary to the Lord Gray, Lord Deputy thereof; and though that his office under his Lord was lucrative, yet got he no estate; but, saith my Author “peculiari Poetis fato, semper cum paupertate conflictatus est.” So that it fared little better with him than with William Xilander the German (a most excellent Linguist, Antiquary, Philosopher and Mathematician), who was so poor, that (as Thuauns saith), he was thought “fami non fame scribere.” Returning into England, he was robb’d by the Rebels of that little he had; and, dying for grief in great want, anno 1598, was honourably buried nigh Chaucer in Westminster.

  Mr. Beeston sayes he was a little man, wore short haire, little band and little cuffs.

  From a MS. paper shew’d me by the rev. Mr. John Ball, who is now printing Spenser’s Pastoral Kalendar in English and Latin. “From a MS. of Nicholas Stone, esq., master mason to their majesties king James y^e first, and afterwards to king Charles the first. I also mad a monement for M^er Spencer the pooett, and set it up at Wesmester, for which the contes of Dorsett payed me 40 lb.” It is to be remark’d, that this monument was erected about 1619, as it appears in this book of Mr. Stone’s handwriting. Also, that the date of 1510, when Spenser was born, is erroneous. It ought to be 1550.

  Two miles north-west of Doneraile is Kilcoleman, a ruined castle of the Earls of Desmond, but more celebrated for being the residence of the immortal Spenser, when he composed his divine poem “The Faerie Queene.” The castle is now almost level with the ground, and was situated on the north side of a fine lake, in the midst of a vast plain, terminated to the east by the county of Waterford mountains; Ballyhowra hills to the north, or, as Spenser terms them, the mountains of Mole, Nagle mountains to the south, and the mountains of Kerry to the west. It commanded a view of above half the breadth of Ireland; and must have been, when the adjacent uplands were wooded, a most pleasant and romantic situation; from whence, no doubt, Spenser drew several parts of the scenery of his poem.

  There are in Pembroke Hall two pictures of Spenser; yet he is almost forgotten there as an alumnus.

  The tender heart and luxuriant fancy of Spenser have thrown round his attachments all the strong interest of reality and all the charm of romance and poetry; and since we know that the first development of his genius was owing to female influence, his Rosalind ought to have been deified for what her beauty achieved, had she possessed sufficient soul to appreciate the lustre of her conquest. Immediately on leaving college, Spenser retired to the north of England, where he first became enamoured of the fair being to whom, according to the fashion of the day, he gave the fanciful appellation of Rosalind. We are told that the letters which form this word being “well ordered,” (that is, transposed) comprehend her real name; but it has hitherto escaped the penetration of his biographers. Two of his friends were entrusted with the secret, and they, with a discretion more to be regretted than blamed, have kept it. One of these, who speaks from personal knowledge, tells us, in a note on the Eclogues, that she was the daughter of a widow; that she was a gentlewoman, and one “that for her rare and singular gifts of person and mind, Spenser need not have been ashamed to love.”

  So many living details of that golden bondage into which our poet was thrown, from his earliest to his latter days, discover the real source of his “secret sorrows,”—his unceasing and vain solicitation at court, the suitor of so many patrons: the res angusta domi perpetually pressed on the morbid imagination of the fortuneless man. I know of no satire aimed at Spenser; a singular fate for a great poet: even “satyric Nash” revered the character of the author of the “Faery Queen.” I have often thought, that, among the numerous critics of Spenser, the truest was his keen and witty contemporary.

  The “Faërie Queene,” “Colin Clout,” and his two cantos on “Mutabilitie,” abound with allegorical or actual descriptions of his Irish life, and of the scenery, and especially the rivers, about his estate here…. The remains of the castle, which consist only of part of the tower, at the southernmost corner, stand on a green mound of considerable extent, overlooking the lake, or rather a winding sort of pond, overgrown with potamogeton…. Here he spent twelve years, and, from every thing that we can learn from his poetry, to his own great satisfaction…. Here he accomplished and saw given to the world half his great work…. Here, too, he married the woman of his heart, chosen on the principle of his poetry, not for her lands, but for her beauty and her goodness…. Here, too, he enjoyed the memorable visit of Sir Walter Raleigh which he commemorates in “Colin Clout.”… When we hear Kilcolman described by Spenser’s biographers as “romantic and delightful,” it is evident that they judged of it from mere fancy; and when all writers about him talk of the Mulla “flowing through his grounds,” and “past his castle,” they give the reader a most erroneous idea. The castle, it must be remembered, is on a wide plain; the hills are at a couple of miles or more distant; and the Mulla is two miles off. We see nothing at the castle but the wide boggy plain, the distant naked hills, and the weedy pond under the castle walls. Such is Kilcolman.

  “Rosalinde” reads, anagrammatically, into Rose Daniel; for, according to Camden, “a letter may be doubled, or rejected, or contrariwise, if the sense fall aptly;” we thus get rid of the redundant e, and have a perfect anagram. Now Spenser had an intimate and beloved friend and brother-poet, named Samuel Daniel…. The supposition that Rose Daniel was Rosalinde satisfies every requisite, and presents a solution of the mystery; the anagram is perfect; the poet’s acquaintance with the brother naturally threw him into contact with the sister; while the circumstance of her marriage with another justifies the complaint of infidelity, and accounts for the “insurmountable barrier,” that is, a living husband.

  He succeeded, with the remaining portion of his family, in escaping to London, where, in a common inn, overcome by his misfortunes, and broken in heart and brain, on the 16th of January, 1599, he died. The saddest thing of all remains to be recorded. Soon after his death—such is the curt statement—“his widow married one Roger Seckerstone.” Did Edmund Spenser, then, after all, appear to his wife Elizabeth as he appeared to Mr. Beeston,—simply as “a little man, who wore short hair, little band, and little cuffs”? One would suppose that the memory of so much genius and glory and calamity would have been better than the presence of “one Roger Seckerstone”! Among the thousands of millions of men born on the planet, it was her fortune to be the companion of Edmund Spenser, and “soon after his death she married one Roger Seckerstone”! It required two years of assiduous courtship, illustrated by sonnets which have made her name immortal, before the adoring poet could hymn, in a transport of gratitude, her acceptance of his hand; but fortunate Mr. Seckerstone did not have to wait! She saw her husband laid in Westminster Abbey, mourned by all that was noble in rank or high in genius, and then, as in the case of another too-celebrated marriage,

	“The funeral baked meats
	Did coldly furnish forth the marriage tables!”

  Without Sidney’s help the author of “The Faerie Queene” would have trudged but lamely through the world.

  The differences between Chaucer and Spenser are seen at a glance in their portraits. Chaucer’s face is round, good-humoured, constitutionally pensive, and thoughtful. You see in it that he has often been amused, and that he may easily be amused again. Spenser’s is of sharper and keener feature, disdainful, and breathing that severity which appertains to so many of the Elizabethan men. A fourteenth-century child, with delicate prescience, would have asked Chaucer to assist her in a strait, and would not have been disappointed. A sixteenth-century child in like circumstances would have shrunk from drawing on herself the regards of the sterner-looking man. We can trace the descent of the Chaucerian face and genius in Shakspeare and Scott, of the Spenserian in Milton and Wordsworth. In our own day, Mr. Browning takes after Chaucer, Mr. Tennyson takes after Spenser.

  Among the memories of the street are its having contained the abodes of the poets Spenser, Sackville, Lord Buckhurst, the Earl of Dorset, and Carew the courtier. In an obscure lodging here, Spenser died “for lack of bread.”

  We know but little of Spenser’s history: if we might know all, I do not fear that we should find anything to destroy the impression made by his verse—that he was a Christian gentleman, a noble and pure-minded man, of highest purposes and aims.

  It was distinctly in his poetical character that he received the honours of a funeral from Devereux, Earl of Essex. His hearse was attended by poets, and mournful elegies and poems, with the pens that wrote them, were thrown into his tomb. What a funeral was that at which Beaumont, Fletcher, Jonson, and, in all probability, Shakspeare attended!—what a grave in which the pen of Shakspeare may be mouldering away! In the original inscription, long ago effaced, the vicinity to Chaucer is expressly stated as the reason for the selection of the spot. The inscription, in pathos and simplicity, is worthy of the author of the “Faery Queen,” but curious as implying the unconsciousness of any greater than he, at that very time, to claim the title then given him of “the Prince of Poets.”

  Kilcolman had been recovered by the poet’s widow after the suppression of Tyrone’s rebellion, and had been wrongfully carried by her, as it seems, to her second husband; at least for a while. It had been a second time devastated, in the rebellion of 1641. It now returned to the Spensers by the justice of the Protector. Other lands near Kilcolman had passed from the poet’s son and heir, Sylvanus, to his younger brother Peregrine. From Charles the Second, William Spenser obtained new lands in the counties of Galway and Roscommon. From William the Third, he obtained a grant of the forfeited estate of his cousin Ugolin Spenser, son of Peregrine. For the same man thus to have benefited by the grants of Cromwell, of Charles, and of William, is probably a circumstance almost unique, even in the eventful history of Tenures in Ireland. Such a fact certainly indicates qualities somewhat different from those of his great ancestor. But, eventually, as the Irish estates of Ralegh had passed to the Earls of Cork, so those of Spenser (or what had remained of them after previous alienations by piecemeal) passed to the Earls of Clancarty. At an early period of the last century, no heir of either Ralegh or Spenser possessed an acre of land in Ireland. It will be long, however, before the memory of either shall be wholly severed from its association with the many natural charms of Lismore and of Kilcolman.

  Our external sources of information are, then, extremely scanty. Fortunately our internal sources are somewhat less meagre. No poet ever more emphatically lived in his poetry than did Spenser. The Muses were, so to speak, his own bosom friends, to whom he opened all his heart. With them he conversed perpetually on the various events of his life; into their ears he poured forth constantly the tale of his joys and his sorrows, of his hopes, his fears, his distresses. He was not one of those poets who can put off themselves in their works, who can forego their own interests and passions, and live for the time an extraneous life. There is an intense personality about all his writings, as in those of Milton and of Wordsworth. In reading them you can never forget the poet in the poem. They directly and fully reflect the poet’s own nature and his circumstances. They are, as it were, fine spiritual diaries, refined self-portraitures…. Of him it is eminently true that we may know him from his works. His poems are his best biography.

  Short curling hair, a full moustache, cut after the pattern of Lord Leicester’s, close-clipped beard, heavy eyebrows, and under them thoughtful brown eyes, whose upper eyelids weigh them dreamily down; a long and straight nose, strongly developed, answering to a long and somewhat spare face, with a well-formed sensible-looking forehead; a mouth almost obscured by the moustache, but still showing rather full lips, denoting feeling, well set together, so that the warmth of feeling shall not run riot, with a touch of sadness in them—such is the look of Spenser as his portrait hands it down to us.

  Expectations and rebuffs, many sorrows and many dreams, some few joys, and a sudden and frightful calamity, a small fortune and a premature end; this indeed was a poet’s life. But the heart within was the true poet—from it all proceeded; circumstances furnished the subject only; he transformed them more than they him; he received less than he gave. Philosophy and landscapes, ceremonies and ornaments, splendours of the country and the court, on all which he painted or thought, he impressed his inward nobleness. Before all, his was a soul captivated by sublime and chaste beauty, eminently platonic; one of these lofty and refined souls most charming of all, who, born in the lap of nature, draw thence their mother’s milk, but soar above, enter the regions of mysticism, and mount instinctively in order to open at the confines of another world.

  Spenser was not without a full share of the poet’s alleged peculiar failings, vanity and irritability. Like Sir Walter Scott, our other great poet of chivalrous heroism, he loved to dwell on his ancestry: he somewhat ostentatiously claimed kindred with the noble house of Spencer. Over his natural pride in the exercise of his great gift, he spread but a thin disguise: his transparent compliments to himself are almost unique. He wrote, or procured or allowed a mysterious friend to write, under the initials E. K., an introduction and explanatory notes to his “Shepherd’s Calendar,” comparing this trial of his wings with similar essays by Theocritus and Virgil, and announcing him as “one that in time shall be able to keep wing with the best.” Among the shepherds he represents himself under the names of Colin Clout and young Cuddy, and makes other shepherds speak of these sweet players on the oaten pipe with boundless admiration as the joy of their fellows and the rivals of Calliope herself. As for the poet’s irritability, that appears in the covert bitterness of his attacks on Roman Catholics and other subjects of his dislike, but most unmistakably in his “View of the State of Ireland.” His temper was too thin for the asperities of public life. These, however, are the unfavourable aspects of the poet’s amiable nature. More favourable aspects of the same reserved meditative disposition appear in his warm gratitude to benefactors, his passion for temperance and purity, and his deep religious earnestness.

  He died poor, but not in want. On the whole, his life may be reckoned a happy one, as in the main the lives of the great poets must have commonly been…. We should measure what Spenser says of his worldly disappointments by the bitterness of the unavailing tears he shed for Rosalinde. A careful analysis of these leaves no perceptible residuum of salt, and we are tempted to believe that the passion itself was not much more real than the pastoral accessories of pipe and crook. I very much doubt whether Spenser ever felt more than one profound passion in his life, and that luckily was for his “Faery Queen.” He was fortunate in the friendship of the best men and women of his time, in the seclusion which made him free of the still better society of the past, in the loving recognition of his countrymen. All that we know of him is amiable and of good report. He was faithful to the friendships of his youth, pure in his loves, unspotted in his life. Above all, the ideal with him was not a thing apart and unattainable, but the sweetener and ennobler of the street and the fireside.

  There are two very diverse portraits extant, each of which has been said to represent Edmund Spenser. One, which is generally recognized as genuine, shows a long face, with a well-sized straight nose, brown eyes, short curling hair, a full moustache, and close-clipped beard; a thoughtful and rather saddened face, corresponding to what we understand his nature to have been—reserved and gentle. The other portrait cannot certainly have been taken from the same original: it is a physiognomy altogether keener—more active, bustling, and mundane.

  Heare lyes (expecting the second comminge of our Saviour Jesus) the body of Edmond Spenser, the Prince of Poets in his tyme, whose divine spirit needs noe othir witnesse then the works which he left behinde him. He was borne in London in the year 1553, and died in the yeare 1598.

The Shepherds Calendar, 1579

	Loe! I have made a Calender for every yeare,
	That Steele in strength, and time in durance, shall outweare;
	And, if I marked well the starres revolution,
	It shall continewe till the worlds dissolution,
	To teach the ruder shepheard how to feede his sheepe,
	And from the falsers fraude his folded flocke to keepe.
	Goe, lyttle Calender! thou hast a free passeporte;
	Goe but a lowly gate emongste the meaner sorte:
	Dare not to match thy pype with Tityrus his style,
	Nor with the Pilgrim that the Ploughman playde awhyle;
	But followe them farre off, and their high steppes adore;
	The better please, the worse despise; I aske no more.

  Now, as touching the generall dryft and purpose of his Æglogues, I mind not to say much, him selfe labouring to conceale it. Onely this appeareth, that his unstayed yougth had long wandred in the common Labyrinth of Love, in which time to mitigate and allay the heate of his passion, or els to warne (as he sayth) the young shepheards, sc. his equalls and companions, of his unfortunate folly, he compiled these xij Æglogues, which, for that they be proportioned to the state of the xij monethes, he termeth the “Shepheards Calendar,” applying an olde name to a new worke.

  Our late famous English Poet, who wrote the “Sheepheards Calender,” where lamenting the decay of Poetry, at these dayes, saith most sweetely to the same:

	Then make thee winges of thine aspyring wytt,
	And whence thou camest flye back to heauen apace, etc.

Whose fine poeticall witt, and most exquisite learning, as he shewed aboundantly in that peece of worke, in my iudgment inferiour to the workes neither of Theocritus in Greeke, nor Virgill in Latine, whom hee narrowly immitateth: so I nothing doubt, but if his other workes were common abroade, which are as I thinke in ye close custodie of certaine his freends, we should haue of our owne Poets, whom wee might matche in all respects with the best. And among all other his workes whatsoeuer, I would wysh to haue the sight of hys English Poet, which his freend E. K. did once promise to publishe, which whether he performed or not, I knowe not, if he did, my happe hath not beene so good as yet to see it…. This place haue I purposely reserued for one, who if not only, yet in my iudgement principally deserueth the tytle of the rightest English Poet, that euer I read: that is, the Author of the “Sheepeheardes Kalender,” intituled to the woorthy Gentleman Master Phillip Sydney, whether it was Master Sp. or what rare Scholler in Pembrooke Hall soeuer, because himself and his freendes, for what respect I knowe not, would not reueale it.

  The last “Sheppards Calender” the reputed worke of S. Phil. Sydney—a worke of deepe learning, judgement and witte, disguised in Shep. Rules.

  Hath much Poetrie in his Eglogues: indeede worthy of the reading, if I be not deceiued. That same framing of his style to an old rustick language, I dare not alowe, sith neyther Theocritus in Greeke, Virgill in Latine, nor Sanazar in Italian, did affect it.

  As Theocritus is famoused for his “Idyllia” in Greeke, and Virgil for his “Eclogues” in Latin; so Spenser their imitatour in his “Shepheardes Calender,” is renowned for the like argument, and honoured for fine poetical invention and most exquisit wit.

  Master Edmund Spenser had done enough for the immortality of his name had he only given us his “Shepherd’s Kalendar;” a master-piece, if any.

  The “Shepherd’s Kalendar” of Spenser is not to be matched in any modern language, not even by Tasso’s “Aminta,” which infinitely transcends Guarini’s “Pastor Fido,” as having more of nature in it, and being almost wholly clear from the wretched affectation of learning…. Spenser, being master of our northern dialect, and skilled in Chaucer’s English, has so exactly imitated the Doric of Theocritus, that his love is a perfect image of that passion which God infused into both sexes, before it was corrupted with the knowledge of arts, and the ceremonies of what we call good manners.

  His Eclogues are somewhat too long, if we compare them with the ancients. He is sometimes too allegorical, and treats of matters of religion in a pastoral style, as the Mantuan had done before him. He has employed the lyric measure, which is contrary to the practice of the old poets. His stanza is not still the same, nor always well chosen…. The addition he has made of a calendar to his Eclogues, is very beautiful; since by this, besides the general moral of innocence and simplicity, which is common to other authors of pastoral, he has one peculiar to himself; he compares human life to the several seasons, and at once exposes to his readers a view of the great and little worlds, in their various changes and aspects.

  There seems to be the same difference between the “Faerie Queen” and the “Shepherd’s Calendar,” as between a royal palace and a little country-seat.

  Neither the “Shepherd’s Calendar” of Spenser, nor the “Pastorals” of Gay, possess that native simplicity and close adherence to the manners and language of country life, which ought to form the basis of this kind of composition.

  A few days since I had the pleasure of conversing with F. Schlegel, one of the first living poets, and a great Æsthetiker; he is the brother of the translator of Shakespeare. He seemed much pleased with one or two pieces by Wordsworth. We talked of our English poets. He holds Spenser to be the greatest in respect to the melody of verse. “When I read him,” says he, “I can hardly think it is a Northern language, much less English.” He holds his “Pastorals” to be his best work, and yet this is a book of which neither you nor I have read a word. I am resolved to leave my favorite authors and study those I have through mistaken notions or absurd prejudices neglected.

  Some have been led to assign the name of Edward Kerke to the old scholiast. Some also have not failed to suppose that King might be the name.

  Yet two great defects have contributed deeply to injure the popularity of his Calender; the adoption of a language much too old and obsolete for the age in which it was written, and the too copious introduction of satire on ecclesiastical affairs. The consequence of this latter defect, this incongruous mixture of church polemics, has been, that the aeglogues for May, July, and September, are any thing but pastorals. Simplicity of diction is of the very essence of perfection in pastoral poetry; but vulgar, rugged, and obscure terms, can only be productive of disgust; a result which was felt and complained of by the contemporaries of the poet, and which not all the ingenuity of his old commentator, E. K., can successfully palliate or defend. The pieces which have been least injured by this “ragged and rustical rudeness,” as the scholiast aptly terms it, are the pastorals for January, June, October and December, which are indeed very beautiful, and the genuine offspring of the rural reed.

  To our minds the irredeemable sin of the “Shepherd’s Calendar”—we wish we could use gentler words, but cannot find them—is the cold, uncomfortable, and unhappy air that hangs in it over almost the whole of rural life. We are always wishing for the sun, but no sun shews his face. Nature is starved, and life hungry—and sleep seems but the relief from labour. There is nowhere Joy.

  The dialect of Theocritus is musical to our ears, and free from vulgarity; praise which we cannot bestow on the uncouth provincial rusticity of Spenser.

  Compare the “Shepherd’s Calendar” with any poetry produced by the best of Spenser’s immediate predecessors, and we shall feel that he alone was all a poet, that they were only poets as it were by assuming and acting the character…. They were poets on occasion, and by dint of tasking their faculties; he was all and always a poet. And, although this first published work, his “Shepherd’s Calendar,” was far from evidencing the full strength or extent of Spenser’s poetic genius, still it was something which may be described as not only superior in excellence but unlike in kind to whatever had previously been produced in the existing form of the language—something as different from what had hitherto been the most approved modern English poetry as the dawn is from the brightest moonlight. It is not only our first English pastoral, but our earliest poetical work of any description, written since the language has been substantially the same that it now is, which can be called a classical work. It forms the commencement of our classical modern English literature.

  No descriptions of external nature since Chaucer’s had equalled those in the “Shepherd’s Calendar” in the combination of various excellences, though the excellences were still second-rate, exhibiting the beautiful genius of the author struggling with the pedantries and affectations of his time, and the pedantries and affectations which overlaid his own mind. Even in his prime, it was difficult for him to grasp a thing in itself, after the manner of the greatest poets, and flash its form and spirit upon the mind in a few vivid words, vital with suggestive meaning. In the “Shepherd’s Calendar” this defect is especially prominent, his imagination playing round objects, illustrating and adorning them, rather than penetrating at once to their essence. Even in those portions where, as Colin Clout, he celebrates the beauty and bewails the coldness of Rosalind, we have a conventional discourse about love, rather than the direct utterance of the passion.

  Had it been required in 1579, as it was shortly afterwards, that a book licensed at Stationers’ Hall should have first received the sanction of the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Bishop of London, or of some of the special persons appointed to that duty, it is just possible that “The Shepheardes Calender” might never have seen the light. Some of the eclogues are decidedly of a political and religious aspect; and though the dialogue is distributed among clowns and shepherds, their remarks are often so severe, personal, and objurgatory, that not a few public men might be disposed to take offence at them. Indeed, it is known that Lord Burghley was highly displeased by the applause bestowed upon Archbishop Grindal; and as a young man, who had his fortune to make, Spenser may have been unwilling to put his name to the publication. Edward Kirke subjoined only his initials to the epistle to Harvey, and afforded no clue to the discovery of the author: the words “unstayed youth,” and the “labyrinth of love” in which that “unstayed youth” had involved himself, were much too general to lead even to an inference; while the anticipation of the manner in which the “new poet” would be admired thereafter, and “his worthiness founded by the tromp of fame,” might only be looked upon as the expression of the somewhat extravagant opinion of enthusiastic friendship.

  His “Shepherd’s Calendar” is a pensive and tender pastoral, full of delicate loves, noble sorrows, lofty ideas, where no voice is heard but of thinkers and poets.

  I look upon the “Shepherd’s Calendar” as being no less a conscious and deliberate attempt at reform than Thomson’s “Seasons” were in the topics, and Wordsworth’s “Lyrical Ballads” in the language of poetry. But the great merit of these pastorals was not so much in their matter as their manner. They show a sense of style in its larger meaning hitherto displayed by no English poet since Chaucer. Surrey had brought back from Italy a certain inkling of it, so far as it is contained in decorum. But here was a new language, a choice and arrangement of words, a variety, elasticity, and harmony of verse most grateful to the ears of men. If not passion, there was fervor, which was perhaps as near it as the somewhat stately movement of Spenser’s mind would allow him to come…. The “Shepherd’s Calendar” contains perhaps the most picturesquely imaginative verse which Spenser has written.

  The identity of “E. K.” with Edmund Spenser is nowhere in contradiction with the form and the contents of the commentary…. It no longer excites surprise that the merits of G. Harvey, not to mention others, are so much expounded in the Epistle and in the notes. If “E. K.” were not Spenser himself, he would have carefully avoided darkening the poet by praising others at his expense, but Spenser doing it himself simply expressed his gratitude to his best friend Harvey. Thus we now know that “E. K.” means Edmund Spenser, and this result enables us to say that all allusions to the life and works of Spenser contained in the “Glosse” are genuine and valuable material for the completion of his biography, whereas the letters between him and Harvey have to be used with great care. But it still continues an open question why Spenser took these letters, or what is meant by them. Most probably this will remain an enigma, like the mysterious “W. H.” of the dedication to Shakspere’s Sonnets.

  When “The Shepheard’s Calender” was born, the breath of genius inspired the old forms with a Chaucerian freshness and a new melody. And from this moment the popularity of the pastoral was assured. It became the normal mode alike for panegyric and erotic verse…. It was Spenser, then, who first made the pastoral a thing of significance for English writers; but he was by no means the creator of it as a literary species.

  A long silence and two generations of effort preceded the renaissance of English poetry, which may conveniently, though perhaps somewhat arbitrarily, be said to date from the publication of the “Shepherd’s Calendar” in 1579.

The Faery Queen, 1590–96

  The generall end therefore of all the booke is to fashion a gentleman or noble person in vertuous and gentle discipline: Which for that I conceived shoulde be most plausible and pleasing, being coloured with an historicall fiction, the which the most part of men delight to read, rather for variety of matter then for profite of the ensample, I chose the historye of King Arthure, as most fitte for the excellency of his person, being made famous by many mens former workes, and also furthest from the daunger of envy, and suspition of present time.

	Me thought I saw the grave where Laura lay,
	Within that Temple where the vestall flame
	Was wont to burne; and passing by that way
	To see that buried dust of living fame,
	Whose tumbe fair love, and fairer vertue kept,
	All suddeinly I saw the Faery Queene:
	At whose approch the soule of Petrarke wept,
	And from thenceforth those graces were not seene;
	For they this Queene attended: in whose steed
	Oblivion laid him downe on Lauras herse.
	Hereat the hardest stones were seene to bleed,
	And grones of buried ghostes the hevens did perse:
	Where Homers sprite did tremble all for griefe,
	And curst th’ accesse of that celestiall theife.

	Let others sing of Knights and Palladines
	In agèd accents, and untimely words;
	Paint shadowes in imaginary lines,
	Which well the reach of their high wit records.

  Immortall Spencer, no frailtie hath thy fame, but the imputation of this Idiots friendship: upon an unspotted Pegasus should thy gorgeous attired “Fayrie Queene” ride triumphant through all reports dominions, but that this mud-born bubble, this bile on the browe of the Universitie, this bladder of pride newe blowne, challengeth some interest in her prosperitie.

	In thy sweete song so blessed may’st thou bee!
	For learned Colin laies his pipe to gage,
	And is to Fayrie gone a pilgrimage;
	The more our mone.

  I know not what more excellent or exquisite poem may be written.

  Graue Spencer was no sooner entred in to this chapell of Apollo, but these elder fathers of the diuine furie gaue him a lawrer, and sung his welcome: Chaucer call’de him his sonne, and plac’de him at his right hand. All of them (at a signe giuen by the whole of the muses that brought him thither) closing vp their lippes in silence, and turning their eares for attention, to heare him sing out the rest of his fayrie queenes praises.

	Live Spenser ever, in thy Fairy Queene,
	Whose like (for deepe conceit) was never seene:
	Crownd mayst thou be, unto thy more renowne,
	(As King of Poets) with a Lawrell Crowne.

	Shew now faire Muse what afterward became
	Of great Achilles Mother; She whose name
	The Mermaids sing, and tell the weeping strand
	A brauer Lady neuer tript on land,
	Except the euer-living Fayerie Queene,
	Whose vertues by her Swaine so written beene,
	That time shall call her high enhanced story
	In his rare song, The Muses chiefest glory.

  I remember when I began to read, and to take some Pleasure in it, there was wont to lye in my Mother’s Parlour (I know not by what accident, for she herself never in her life read any Book but of Devotion) but there was wont to lye Spencer’s works; this I happen’d to fall upon, and was infinitely delighted with the Stories of the Knights, and Giants, and Monsters, and brave Houses, which I found every where there: (Though my Understanding had little to do with all this) and by degrees with the Tinkling of the Rhyme and Dance of the Numbers, so that I think I had read him all over before I was twelve years old, and was thus made a Poet as irremediably as a Child is made an Eunuch.

  There is no uniformity in the design of Spenser: he aims at the accomplishment of no one action; he raises up a hero for every one of his adventures; and endows each of them with some particular moral virtue, which renders them all equal, without subordination, or preference. Every one is most valiant in his own legend: only we must do him that justice to observe, that magnanimity, which is the character of Prince Arthur, shines throughout the whole poem; and succours the rest, when they are in distress. The original of every knight was then living in the court of Queen Elizabeth; and he attributed to each of them that virtue, which he thought was most conspicuous in them; an ingenious piece of flattery, though it turned not much to his account. Had he lived to finish his poem, in the six remaining legends, it had certainly been more of a piece; but could not have been perfect, because the model was not true. But Prince Arthur, or his chief patron Sir Philip Sidney, whom he intended to make happy by the marriage of his Gloriana, dying before him, deprived the poet both of means and spirit to accomplish his design. For the rest, his obsolete language, and the ill choice of his stanza, are faults but of the second magnitude; for, notwithstanding the first, he is still intelligible, at least after a little practice; and for the last, he is the more to be admired, that, labouring under such a difficulty, his verses are so numerous, so various, and so harmonious, that only Virgil, whom he professedly imitated, has surpassed him among the Romans; and only Mr. Waller among the English.

	Old Spenser next, warm’d with poetic rage,
	In ancient tales amused a barbarous age;
	An age that yet uncultivate and rude,
	Where’er the poet’s fancy led, pursued
	Through pathless fields and unfrequented floods,
	To dens of dragons and enchanted woods.
	But now the mystic tale that pleased of yore,
	Can charm an understanding age no more;
	The long-spun allegories fulsome grow,
	While the dull moral lies too plain below.
	We view well-pleased at distance all the sights
	Of arms and palfreys, battles, fields, and fights,
	And damsels in distress, and courteous knights.
	But, when we look too near, the shades decay,
	And all the pleasing landscape fades away.

	When bright Eliza ruled Britannia’s state,
	Widely distributing her high commands,
	And boldly wise, and fortunately great,
	Freed the glad nations from tyrannic bands;
	An equal genius was in Spenser found;
	To the high theme he match’d his noble lays;
	He travell’d England o’er on fairy ground,
	In mystic notes to sing his monarch’s praise:
	Reciting wondrous truths in pleasing dreams,
	He deck’d Eliza’s head with Gloriana’s beams.

  Spencer’s general plan is the representation of six virtues, holiness, temperance, chastity, friendship, justice, and courtesy, in six legends, by six persons. The six personages are supposed, under proper allegories suitable to their respective characters, to do all that is necessary for the full manifestation of the respective virtues which they are to exert. These one might undertake to show, under the several heads are admirably drawn; no images improper, and most surprisingly beautiful. The Redcross Knight runs through the whole steps of the Christian life; Guyon does all that temperance can possibly require; Britomartis (a woman) observes the true rules of unaffected chastity; Arthegal is in every respect of life strictly and wisely just; Calidore is rightly courteous. In short, in fairy-land, where knights-errant have a full scope to range, and to do even what Ariostos or Orlandos could not do in the world without breaking into credibility, Spencer’s knights have, under those six heads, given a full and truly poetical system of Christian, public, and low life. His legend of friendship is more diffuse, and yet even there the allegory is finely drawn, only the heads various; one knight could not there support all the parts. To do honour to his country, Prince Arthur is an universal hero; in holiness, temperance, chastity, and justice, superexcellent. For the same reason, and to compliment Queen Elizabeth, Gloriana, queen of fairies, whose court was the asylum of the oppressed, represents that glorious queen.

  If we consider the first book as an entire work of itself, we shall find it to be no irregular contrivance. There is one principal action, which is completed in the twelfth canto, and the several incidents are proper, as they tend either to obstruct or promote it.

	Nor shall my verse that elder bard forget,
	The gentle Spenser, Fancy’s pleasing son;
	Who, like a copious river, pour’d his song
	O’er all the mazes of enchanted ground.

  After reading a canto of Spenser two or three days ago to an old lady, between seventy and eighty years of age, she said that I had been showing her a gallery of pictures.—I don’t know how it is, but she said very right: there is something in Spenser that pleases one as strongly in one’s old age, as it did in one’s youth. I read the “Faerie Queene” when I was about twelve, with infinite delight; and I think it gave me as much, when I read it over about a year or two ago.

  To imitate the fictions and sentiments of Spenser can incur no reproach; for allegory is perhaps one of the most pleasing vehicles of instruction. But I am very far from extending the same respect to his diction or his stanza. His style was in his own time allowed to be vicious, so darkened with old words and peculiarities of phrase, and so remote from common use, that Jonson boldly pronounces him to have written no language. His stanza is at once difficult and unpleasing; tiresome to the ear by its uniformity, and to the attention by its length. It was at first formed in imitation of the Italian poets, without due regard to the genius of our language.

  The chief merit of this poem, no doubt, consists in that surprising vein of fabulous invention, which runs through it, and enriches it every where with imagery and descriptions, more than we meet with in any other modern poem. The author seems to be possessed of a kind of poetical magic, and the figures he calls up to our view rise so thick upon us, that we are at once pleased and distracted with the exhaustless variety of them; so that his faults may in a manner be imputed to his excellencies. His abundance betrays him into excess, and his judgment is overborn by the torrent of his imagination. That which seems the most liable to exception in this work is the model of it, and the choice the author has made of so romantic a story.

  Although Spenser formed his “Faerie Queene” upon the fanciful plan of Ariosto, yet it must be confessed, that the adventures of his knights are a more exact and immediate copy of those which we meet with in old romances, or books of chivalry, than of those which form the Orlando Furioso. Ariosto’s knights exhibit surprising examples of their prowess, and achieve many heroic actions. But our author’s knights are more professedly engaged in revenging injuries, and doing justice to the distressed; which was the proper business, and ultimate end of the ancient knight-errantry. And thus, though many of Spenser’s incidents are to be found in Ariosto, such as that of blowing a horn, at the sound of which the gates of a castle fly open, of the vanishing of an enchanted palace or garden, after some knight has destroyed the enchanter, and the like; yet these are not more peculiarly the property of Ariosto, than they are common to all ancient romances in general.

  This poet contains great beauties, a sweet and harmonious versification, easy elocution, a fine imagination. Yet does the perusal of his work become so tedious, that one never finishes it from the mere pleasure which it affords: it soon becomes a kind of task-reading; and it requires some effort and resolution to carry us on to the end of his long performance…. The tediousness of continued allegory, and that too seldom striking or ingenious, has also contributed to render the “Fairy Queen” peculiarly tiresome; not to mention the too great frequency of its descriptions, and the languor of its stanza. Upon the whole, Spenser maintains his place upon the shelves, among our English classics; but he is seldom seen on the table; and there is scarcely any one, if he dares to be ingenious, but will confess, that, notwithstanding all the merit of the poet, he affords an entertainment with which the palate is soon satiated. Several writers of late have amused themselves in copying the style of Spenser; and no imitation has been so indifferent as not to bear a great resemblance to the original: his manner is so peculiar, that it is almost impossible not to transfer some of it into the copy.

	Sage Spenser waked his lofty lay
	To grace Eliza’s golden sway:
	O’er the proud theme new lustre to diffuse,
	He chose the gorgeous allegoric muse,
	And call’d to life old Uther’s elfin tale,
	And rov’d thro’ many a necromantic vale,
	Portraying chiefs that knew to tame
	The goblin’s ire, the dragon’s flame,
	To pierce the dark enchanted hall,
	Where virtue sate in lonely thrall.
	From fabling Fancy’s inmost store
	A rich romantic robe he bore;
	A veil with visionary trappings hung,
	And o’er his virgin-queen the fairy texture flung.

  It is scarcely possible to accompany Spenser’s allegorical heroes to the end of their excursions. They want flesh and blood; a want for which nothing can compensate. The personification of abstract ideas furnishes the most brilliant images for poetry; but these meteor forms, which startle and delight us when our senses are flurried by passion, must not be submitted to our cool and deliberate examination.

  The nobility of the Spencers has been illustrated and enriched by the trophies of Marlborough; but I exhort them to consider “The Faerie Queene” as the most precious jewel of their coronet.

  No author, perhaps, ever possessed and combined, in so a brilliant a degree, the requisite qualities of a poet. Learned, according to the learning of his times, his erudition never appears to load or encumber his powers of imagination; but even the fictions of the classics, worn out as they are by the use of every pedant, become fresh and captivating themes, when adopted by his fancy, and accommodated to his plan. If that plan has now become to the reader of riper years somewhat tedious and involved, it must be allowed, on the other hand, that from Cowley downwards, every youth of imagination has been enchanted with the splendid legends of the “Faery Queen.”

  I have finished the “Faerie Queene.” I never parted from a long poem with so much regret. He is a poet of a most musical ear—of a tender heart—of a peculiarly soft, rich, fertile, and flowery fancy. His verse always flows, with ease and nature, most abundantly and sweetly; his diffusion is not only pardonable, but agreeable. Grandeur and energy are not his characteristic qualities. He seems to me a most genuine poet, and to be justly placed after Shakspeare and Milton, and above all other English poets.

  Your abhorrence of Spenser is a strange heresy. I admit that he is inferior to Chaucer (who for variety of power has no competitor except Shakespeare), but he is the great master of English versification, incomparably the greatest master in our language. Without being insensible to the defects of the “Fairy Queen,” I am never weary of reading it.

  But some people will say that all this may be very fine, but that they cannot understand it on account of the allegory. They are afraid of the allegory, as if they thought it would bite them: they look at it as a child looks at a painted dragon, and think it will strangle them in its shining folds. This is very idle. If they do not meddle with the allegory, the allegory will not meddle with them. Without minding it at all, the whole is as plain as a pike-staff. It might as well be pretended that we cannot see Poussin’s pictures for the allegory, as that the allegory prevents us from understanding Spenser…. The language of Spenser is full and copious to overflowing; it is less pure and idiomatic than Chaucer’s, and is enriched and adorned with phrases borrowed from the different languages of Europe, both ancient and modern…. His versification is at once the most smooth and the most sounding in the language…. Spenser is the most harmonious of our stanza-writers, as Dryden is the most sounding and varied of our rhymists.

	A silver trumpet Spenser blows,
	And, as its martial notes to silence flee,
	From a virgin chorus flows,
	A hymn in praise of spotless Chastity.
	’Tis still! Wild warblings from the Æolian lyre
	Enchantment softly breathe, and tremblingly expire.

  Nay, even Spenser himself, though assuredly one of the greatest poets that ever lived, could not succeed in the attempt to make allegory interesting. It was in vain that he lavished the riches of his mind on the House of Pride and the House of Temperance. One unpardonable fault, the fault of tediousness, pervades the whole of the “Faerie Queen.” We become sick of Cardinal Virtues and Deadly Sins, and long for the society of plain men and women. Of the persons who read the first Canto, not one in ten reaches the end of the First Book, and not one in a hundred perseveres to the end of the poem. Very few and very weary are those who are in at the death of the Blatant Beast. If the last six books, which are said to have been destroyed in Ireland, had been preserved, we doubt whether any heart less stout than that of a commentator would have held out to the end.

  The noblest allegorical poem in our own language,—indeed, the noblest allegorical poem in the world.

  The poetry of Spenser is remarkable for brilliant imagination, fertile indention, and flowing rhythm; yet with all these recommendations, it is cold and tedious. To the English reader the “Faerie Queene” presents the charm of antiquated style, which never fails to please us in our own language, but which we cannot appreciate in a foreign tongue.

  The first book of the “Faery Queen” is a complete poem, and, far from requiring any continuation, is rather injured by the useless re-appearance of its hero in the second. It is generally admitted to be the finest of the six. In no other is the allegory so clearly conceived by the poet, or so steadily preserved, yet with a disguise so dedicate, that no one is offended by that servile setting-forth of a moral meaning we frequently meet with in allegorical poems; and the reader has the gratification which good writing in works of fiction always produces,—that of exercising his own ingenuity without perplexing it…. Every canto of this book teems with the choicest beauties of imagination: he came to it in the freshness of his genius, which shines throughout with an uniformity it does not always afterwards maintain, unsullied as yet by flattery, unobstructed by pedantry, and unquenched by languor…. The inferiority of the last three books to the former is surely very manifest. His muse gives gradual signs of weariness, the imagery becomes less vivid, the vein of poetical description less rich, the digressions more frequent and verbose. It is true that the fourth book is full of beautiful inventions, and contains much admirable poetry; yet, even here, we perceive a comparative deficiency in the quantity of excelling passages, which becomes far more apparent as we proceed; and the last book falls very short of the interest which the earlier part of the “Faery Queen” had excited.

  The noble stanza which we owe to Spenser, is formed by adding an alexandrine to the ballet-stave of eight—such alexandrine rhiming with the last verse of the ballet-stave. By this banding of the rhime, Spenser’s stanza has all that connexion of parts which science demands, and which is so seldom to be met with in our later combinations. The sweeping length of the alexandrine furnishes also an imposing compass of sound, that to many ears is singularly delightful, and must, I think, convey to everyone an impression of grandeur and of dignity. When to these advantages of structure are added the associations, which Spenser’s genius conferred upon it, we may understand the enthusiasm, that sees so many excellencies in Spenser’s stanza, and pronounces it to be the most beautiful, as well as the most perfect of English combinations. Warton’s notice of this stanza is almost the only exception to the eulogies of our critics.

  Of his great poem we may say, that we miss no humanity in it, because we make a new humanity out of it and are satisfied in our human hearts—a new humanity vivified by the poet’s life, moving in happy measure to the chanting of his thoughts and upon ground supernaturally beautified by his sense of the beautiful.

  The advantage of the plan lies in what it gets rid of. To one who is not accustomed to it, Spenser’s abundance is often oppressive: it is like wading among unmown grass…. It is not a poem like the Iliad, fiery, passionate, dramatic as life itself; it is all more like to a dream than to waking life. Its descriptions and pictures, it must be confessed, more resemble visions in the clouds than anything to be seen on the earth. And this, we apprehend, is what Coleridge must be understood to mean when he says that Spenser’s descriptions are not, in the true sense of the word, picturesque; but then no more are Claude’s landscapes picturesque…. He is surely one of the very greatest of painters in words; diffuse and florid, no doubt, rather than energetic and expressive; but of what affluence and prodigality of power and resources in his own style, of what inexhaustible ingenuity and invention, of what flowing freedom of movement, of how deep and exquisite a sense of beauty! He is, indeed, distinctively and pre-eminently the Poet of the Beautiful…. Spenser’s verse is the most abundantly musical in English poetry. Even Milton’s, more scientific and elaborate, and also rising at times to more volume and grandeur of tone, has not so rich a natural sweetness and variety, or so deep a pathos.

  We have thus a poet ungifted with the smiting directness of power, the soaring and darting imagination, of the very highest order of minds; a man sensitive, tender, grateful, dependent; reverential to the unseen realities of the spiritual world, deferential to the crowned and coroneted celebrites of the world of fact; but we still have not yet touched the peculiarities of his special genius. If we pass into the inner world of the poet’s spirit, where he really lived and brooded, we forget criticism in the loving wonder and admiration evoked by the sight of that “paradise of devices,” both “dainty” and divine. We are in communion with a nature in which the most delicate, the most voluptuous, sense of beauty is in exquisite harmony with the austerest recognition of the paramount obligations of goodness and rectitude. The beauty of material objects never obscures to him the transcendent beauty of holiness. In his Bowers of Bliss and his Houses of Pride he surprises even voluptuaries by the luxuriousness of his descriptions, and dazzles even the arrogant by the towering bravery of his style; but his Bowers of Bliss repose on caverns of bale, and the glories of his House of Pride are built over human carcasses.

	In Spenser’s labyrinthine rhymes
	I throw my arms o’erhead at times,
	Opening sonorous mouth as wide
	As oystershells at ebb of tide.
	Mistake me not: I honour him
	Whose magic made the Muses dream
	Of things they never knew before,
	And scenes they never wandered o’er.
	I dare not follow, nor again
	Be wafted with the wizard train.
	No bodyless and soulless elves
	I seek, but creatures like ourselves.
	If any poet now runs after
	The Faeries, they will split with laughter,
	Leaving him in the desert, where
	Dry grass is emblematic fare.

  His is the Germanic picture, but how beautiful are the colours with which it glows! What richness of that poetic sentiment with which English genius by reason of its depth and truth can animate nature! What beauty of language, what admirable propriety of epithet, what harmony of verse!… Spenser is one of the brightest glories of modern literature; and England may well be proud of him, for his genius was emphatically English.

  If I spoke to you at all of him, I should soon weary your patience, for I could not speak briefly; I have so much regard and affection for him. I only mention him as one of the most remarkable instances that great poems are composed not in easy, lazy times, but when there is most work doing, and when there are the most strong and energetic men to do it. Spenser was fond of allegory. If he had lived in a leisurely age he might only have been an inventor of conceits and allegories. But he was a patriot; he visited Ireland and saw its miseries; he loved his queen; he dreamed of a more glorious queen than she had ever been. So, whether his book is called an allegory or not, it tells of real and not sham fights, fights in which you and I are engaged. When we read him, we need not trouble ourselves much about Fairy-land. Here, in this land, amidst our own hills and valleys, in the streets of that city where Spenser was born and died, in the streets of every English town, we shall find plenty of evil enchanters, and also divine helpers who can overcome them for us all.

  Beautiful vision! creature of the poet’s soul! “heavenly Una with thy milk-white lamb!” let us, ere thou fadest away, look on thy brightness; that we may take thy picture into our hearts—even as the sunlight transfers the features of those we love into the darkened chamber, and fixes them for ever. Pure and holy and tender—and, above all, true. True when solitary and unprotected—true when assailed by falsehood. Strong and steadfast under trials unmerited, when the manhood of thy knight gave way, because he was frail and faulty. Type of all that woman should be: without a thought to mar thine innocence, or a speck to cloud thy purity!

  In fact, among all these poems there is one truly divine, so divine that the reasoners of succeeding ages have found it wearisome, that even now but few understand it—Spenser’s “Faerie Queene.”… Spenser’s characteristic is the vastness and the overflow of picturesque invention. Like Rubens, he creates whole scenes, beyond the region of all traditions, to express distinct ideas. As with Rubens, his allegory swells its proportions beyond all rule, and withdraws fancy from all law, except in so far as it is necessary to harmonise forms and colours. For, if ordinary spirits receive from allegory a certain oppression, lofty imaginations receive wings which carry them aloft. Rescued by it from the common conditions of life, they can dare all things, beyond imitation, apart from probability, with no other guide but their inborn energy and their shadowy instincts.

  Profoundly earnest, and the work of a pure mind, the “Faerie Queene” is yet bitter at core. It is the work of a great poet, who felt and expressed both the essence and the accidents of the great struggle in which he was himself a combatant. Through all its delicious melody it breathes a stern defiance of whatever cause was not, in the eyes of a true-hearted Elizabethan Puritan, the cause of God. The deeper allegory that expresses abstract truth holds on throughout the “Faerie Queene” its steady course, but it is conveyed through many references, in their own time not in the least obscure, to affairs of England, Ireland, France, Spain, Belgium.

  The appearance of the “Faerie Queen” is the one critical event in the annals of English poetry; it settled, in fact, the question whether there was to be such a thing as English poetry or not…. The new English verse has been true to the source from which it sprang, and Spenser has always been “the poet’s poet.” But in his own day he was the poet of England at large. The “Faerie Queen” was received with a burst of general welcome. It became “the delight of every accomplished gentleman, the model of every poet, the solace of every soldier.” The poem expressed, indeed, the very life of the time…. The gorgeous colouring, the profuse and often complex imagery which Spenser’s imagination lavishes, leave no sense of confusion in the reader’s mind. Every figure, strange as it may be, is seen clearly and distinctly as it passes by. It is in this calmness, this serenity, this spiritual elevation of the “Faerie Queen,” that we feel the new life of the coming age moulding into ordered and harmonious form the life of the Renascence…. He is habitually serious, and the seriousness of his poetic tone reflects the seriousness of his poetic purpose.

  That, when the personal allusions have lost their meaning and the allegory has become a burden, the book should continue to be read with delight, is proof enough, were any wanting, how full of life and light and the other-worldliness of poetry it must be. As a narrative it has, I think, every fault of which that kind of writing is capable…. His natural tendency is to shun whatever is sharp and abrupt. He loves to prolong emotion, and lingers in his honeyed sensations like a bee in the translucent cup of a lily. So entirely are beauty and delight in it the native element of Spenser, that, whenever in the “Faery Queen” you come suddenly on the moral, it gives you a shock of unpleasant surprise, a kind of grit, as when one’s teeth close on a bit of gravel in a dish of strawberries and cream. He is the most fluent of our poets. Sensation passing through emotion into revery is a prime quality of his manner. And to read him puts one in the condition of revery, a state of mind in which our thoughts and feelings float motionless, as one sees fish do in a gentle stream, with just enough vibration of their fins to keep themselves from going down with the current, while their bodies yield indolently to all its soothing curves. He chooses his language for its rich canorousness rather than for intensity of meaning. To characterize his style in a single word, I should call it costly. None but the daintiest and nicest phrases will serve him, and he allures us from one to the other with such cunning baits of alliteration, and such sweet lapses of verse, that never any word seems more eminent than the rest, nor detains the feeling to eddy around it, but you must go on to the end before you have time to stop and muse over the wealth that has been lavished on you.

  “The Faerie Queen” is the noblest monument of the fine cultivation of Elizabeth’s age.

  An embattled cloudland lit most transfiguring tints of the rising and the setting sun.

  So multifarious is the poem, full of all that he thought, or observed, or felt; a receptacle, without much care to avoid repetition, or to prune, correct, and condense, for all the abundance of his ideas, as they welled forth in his mind day by day. It is really a collection of separate tales and allegories, as much as the “Arabian Nights,” or as its counterpart and rival of our own century, the “Idylls of the King.” As a whole, it is confusing; but we need not treat it as a whole. Its continued interest soon breaks down. But it is probably best that Spenser gave his mind the vague freedom which suited it, and that he did not make efforts to tie himself down to his pre-arranged but too ambitious plan. We can hardly lose our way in it, for there is no way to lose. It is a wilderness in which we are left to wander. But there may be interest and pleasure in a wilderness, if we are prepared for the wandering.

  The pleasure derived from that poem to most minds is, I am convinced, analogous to that already spoken of as being imparted by a foreign author: namely, the satisfaction at finding it—in places—intelligible. For the few who possess the poetic faculty it has great beauties, but I observe, from the extracts that appear in Poetic Selections and the like, that the most tedious and even the most monstrous passages are those which are generally offered for admiration. The case of Spenser in this respect—which does not stand alone in ancient English literature—has a curious parallel in art, where people are positively found to go into ecstasies over a distorted limb or a ludicrous inversion of perspective, simply because it is the work of an old master, who knew no better, or followed the fashion of his time.

  I would sooner read through the whole poem than twenty pages of commentary. There is no mystery in its ground plan.

  It is not to the existence of allegory in Spenser that all save his fanatical admirers object; it is to the fact that this allegory, like Mrs. Malaprop’s “on the banks of the Nile,” is a rapacious and insatiable impostor who attracts and devours all living likenesses of men and women within reach. There is allegory also in Homer and in Dante; but prayers in Homer and qualities in Dante become vital and actual forms of living and breathing creatures. In Spenser the figure of a just man melts away into the quality of justice, the likeness of a chaste woman is dissolved into the abstraction of chastity. Nothing can be more alien from the Latin genius, with its love of clearness and definite limitation, than this indefinite and inevitable cloudiness of depiction rather than conception, which reduces the most tangible things to impalpable properties, resolves the solidest realities into smoke of perfumed metaphor from the crucible of symbolic fancy, and suffuses with Cimmerian mist the hard Italian sunlight. Add to this the cloying sweetness of the Spenserian metre, with all “its treasures of fluidity and sweet ease” (as Mr. Arnold, with his usual studious felicity of exquisite phrase, has so perfectly described it), which leaves at least some readers, after a dose of a few pages, overgorged with a sense that they have been eating a whole hive’s harvest of thick pressed honey by great spoonfuls, without one halfpennyworth of bread to this intolerable deal of sweet-stuff; and it is easy to determine why the attraction of this noble poet, for all his luminous colour and lovely melody, the raiment of high thinking, and fine feeling, is perhaps less potent than it should be over minds first nurtured on the stronger fare of Greek or Latin or Italian song.

  We need go no farther than the first book of the “Faery Queen” for a proof that Spenser could illustrate human nature as well as allegorise the Passions; for its heroine, Una, is one of the noblest contributions which poetry, whether of ancient or modern times, has made to its great picture gallery of character.

  The dullest portions of Spenser’s poem are those in which he works with most self-consciousness, piecing together definite meanings to definite symbols; where his love of beauty slumbers and his spirit of ingenuity awakes; where his ideas do not play and part and gather themselves together and deploy themselves abroad, like the shifting and shredding of clouds blown by soft upper airs, but are rather cut out with hard edges by some process of mechanism…. Two qualities of Spenser’s genius have made the “Faerie Queene” a poem, and saved it from becoming a frigid moral allegory or a mere masque of the fancy: one was his delight in sensuous beauty; the other his delight in lovely and heroic human character.

  I will not ask if you have read the “Faery Queen”: I fear that a great many dishonest speeches are made on that score; I am afraid that I equivocated myself in youngish days; but now I will be honest in saying—I never read it through continuously and of set purpose; I have tried it—on winter nights, and gone to sleep in my chair: I have tried it, under trees in summer, and have gone to sleep on the turf: I have tried it, in the first blush of a spring morning, and have gone—to breakfast. Yet there are many who enjoy it intensely and continuously: Mr. Saintsbury says, courageously, that it is the only long poem he honestly wishes were longer. It is certainly full of idealism; it is full of sweet fancies; it is rich in dragonly horrors; it is crammed with exquisite harmonies. But—its tenderer heroines are so shadowy, you cannot bind them to your heart; nay, you can scarce follow them with your eyes: Now, you catch a strain which seems to carry a sweet womanly image of flesh and blood—of heartiness and warmth. But—at the turning of a page—his wealth of words so enwraps her in glowing epithets, that she fades on your vision to a mere iridescence and a creature of Cloud-land.

  To tune the sensibilities to the subtlest elements of poetic form, one need not go outside of the wide domain of the “Faerie Queene.”

  The “Faerie Queene” came, and in it the second, if not the first, great poem in English. It is not necessary to call or think Spenser a greater poet than Chaucer in order to give the “Faerie Queene,” as a great poem, the precedence over the “Canterbury Tales.” In some qualities, at least, of the poet, the master had the advantage over the scholar. But in others, the scholar’s greatest production has by an even greater interval the precedence over any single work of the master’s. It has more unity, a deeper-ingrained and more individual colour, a subtler if less primitive charm, and, above all, it has the attraction of an individual and original and, to some fancies at any rate, an absolutely unequalled metrical medium…. Such a melodious burst had never sounded in the English tongue before. The wonderful web of imagination, woven so silently and cunningly in its pages, the splendid creations—not merely of poetic fancy but of actual character drawing and ethical construction—which it displays, the consummate skill in language and metre (the former, it may be, like the latter, a little mannered and artificial, but with such an exquisite manner, such a consummate art), the learning, the grasp, the evident reserve of sustained capacity behind—these were things which had never, or but once, been seen before among us.

  Assuredly, when all that cavillers can say or do is said and done, “The Faerie Queene” is deservedly called one of the greatest poems of English literature. From the high place it took, and took with acclamation, when it first appeared, it has, in fact, never been deposed. It has many defects and imperfections, such as the crudest and most commonplace critic can discover, and has discovered with much self-complacency; but it has beauties and perfections that such critics very often fail to see; and, so far as the status of “The Faerie Queene” is concerned, it is enough for the ordinary reader to grasp the significant fact that Spenser has won specially for himself the famous title of “the poets’ poet.” Ever since his star appeared above the horizon, wise men from all parts have come to worship it; and amongst these devotees fellow-poets have thronged with a wonderful enthusiasm…. The lights in his temple, so to speak, have never been extinguished—never have there been wanting offers of incense and of praise; and, to repeat in other words what has already been said, as it is what we wish to specially emphasise, amidst this faithful congregation have been many who already had or were some day to have temples of their own.

  Taken without relation to its time, it is a miracle of sustained and extended beauty; but considered historically, it is nothing less than a portent…. The greatest of all English poems of romantic adventure is steeped in the peculiar enchantment of the Celts. It often seems little more or less than a mabinogi extended and embroidered, a Celtic dream tempered with moral allegory and political allusion. Not in vain had Spenser for so many years inhabited that “most beautiful and sweet country,” the Island of Dreams and melancholy fantasy. Cradled in the richness of Italy, trained in the mistiness of Ireland, the genius of Spenser was enabled to give to English poetry exactly the qualities it most required. Into fields made stony and dusty with systematic pedantry it poured a warm and fertilising rain of romance.

  The “Faerie Queene” is the typical work of the English renaissance; there hamadryads, satyrs, and river gods mingle unblushingly with knights, dragons, sorcerers, hermits, and personified vices and virtues.

  Spenser is the only Renaissance poet who entered with simple seriousness into the spirit of the chivalric romance, neither dallying with it nor ridiculing it, but inspired by its elements of beauty and greatness. His wonderfully vivid imaginative power enabled him to bring together mediæval knights and ladies, Olympian gods and goddesses, and all the woodland troop of satyrs and nymphs, mingling, without the least discord or incongruity, with his allegorical personages and working out his scheme of Christian morality.

Amoretti, 1595

  To our tongue the sonnet is mortal, and the parent of insipidity. The imitation in some degree of it was extremely noxious to a true poet, our Spenser; and he was the more injudicious by lengthening his stanza in a language so barren of rhymes as ours, and in which several words whose terminations are of similar sounds are so rugged, uncouth, and unmusical. The consequence was, that many lines which he forced into the service to complete the quota of his stanza are unmeaning, or silly, or tending to weaken the thought he would express.

  Spenser wrote all the sonnets which he finally published when he was forty years of age, under the title of “Amoretti,”—Little Loves. The title is good; but compared with what was to be expected of them, these Little Loves—not to speak it irreverently—are rather a set of dull, middle-aged gentlemen, images of the author’s time of life, and of the commonplace sufferings which he appears to have undergone from a young and imperious mistress.

  Spenser’s own love-story forms the subject of the “Amoretti” (1595). Amid so much fruitless sonnet-wooing as was then in vogue, one welcomes the advent of a poet who to many higher merits adds the very rare one of having prosecuted a successful suit; though it is not in the “Amoretti,” but in the glorious nuptial ode published with them, the “Epithalamion,” that Spenser celebrates his triumph most divinely. Notwithstanding the exceptional feature referred to, however, and the oft-recurring signature of his genius throughout, unprejudiced readers must acknowledge that these sonnets are disappointing.

  The “Amoretti” written in this metre, and undoubtedly representing some, at least, of Spenser’s latest written work, rank with the best of Sidney’s, and hardly below the best of Shakespere’s while both of them and in the earlier sonnets the note of regret mingled with delight—the special Renaissance note—sounds as it rarely does in any other English verse.

  He has not Shakespere’s supreme greatness, he is not a mountain oak in strength and grasp, but he is like the graceful poplar that shoots high its slender spire of boughs by some quiet stream. Spenser’s love-sonnets, his Amoretti, as he calls them, have the same spirituelle sensuousness, the same winsome grace and refined simplicity which so charm us in the “Faerie Queen.” In them we find the naïveté not of the rustic, but of the gentleman.

Epithalamion, 1595

	Sweet Spenser, sweetest Bard; yet not more sweet
	Than pure was he, and not more pure than wise;
	High Priest of all the Muses’ mysteries.
	I called to mind that mighty Master’s song,
	When he brought home his beautifulest bride,
	And Mulla murmured her sweet undersong,
	And Mole with all his mountain-woods replied;
	Never to mortal lips a strain was given,
	More rich with love, more redolent of Heaven.
	His cup of joy was mantling to the brim,
	Yet solemn thoughts enhanced his deep delight;
	A holy feeling filled his marriage-hymn,
	And Love aspired with Faith a heavenward flight.

  Spenser married his Elizabeth, about the year 1593, and he has crowned his amatory effusions with a most impassioned and triumphant epithalamion on his own nuptials, which he concludes with a prophecy, that it shall stand a perpetual monument of his happiness, and thus it has been. The passage in which he describes his youthful bride, is perhaps one of the most beautiful and vivid pictures in the whole compass of English poetry.

  No poet that ever lived had a more exquisite sense of the Beautiful than Spenser. Of profounder passion many poets have been blest or cursed with the power. His were indeed “thoughts that breathe,” but not “words that burn.” His words have a lambent light. Reading him is like gazing on the starry skies—or on the skies without a star—except perhaps one—the evening star—and all the rest of heaven in still possession of the moon. His love of woman’s life is spiritual—yet voluptuous; and desire itself is hallowed, kindling at sight of beauty “emparadised in such sweet flesh.” Nothing meretricious in the Lady of his Lays. Chaste as Dian the Creature of his bridal, his nuptial Hymn.

  It is a strain redolent of a bridegroom’s joy, and of a poet’s fancy. The English language seems to expand itself with a copiousness unknown before, while he pours forth the varied imagery of this splendid little poem. I do not know any other nuptial song, ancient or modern, of equal beauty. It is an intoxication of ecstasy, ardent, noble and pure.

  I know no poem that realises so directly and vividly the idea of winged words: no poem whose verses soar and precipitate themselves with such a vehemence of impetuous ardour and exultation.

  The whole “Epithalamion” is very noble, with an organ-like roll and majesty of numbers, while it is instinct with the same joyousness which must have been the familiar mood of Spenser. It is no superficial and tiresome merriment, but a profound delight in the beauty of the universe and in that delicately surfaced nature of his which was its mirror and counterpart.

  The finest composition of its kind, probably, in any language: so impetuous and unflagging, so orderly and yet so rapid in the onward march of its stately and varied stanzas; so passionate, so flashing with imaginative wealth, yet so refined and self-restrained.

  I have heard Wordsworth remark, more than once, that in its long and exquisitely balanced stanzas there was a swanlike movement and a subtle metrical sweetness, the secret of which he could never wholly discover; and the like of which he found nowhere else except in Milton’s “Lycidas.”

  To my mind the gracious humanity—the exquisite naturalness of this is worth an ocean of cloying prettinesses about Gloriana and Britomart.

Colin Clouts Come Home Again, 1595

  Nature, it is true, contains one secret by no means easily discovered when it has once been obscured; but the poets throw over that secret an almost impenetrable covering of words, figures, and symbols, making the task of discovery infinitely more difficult than Nature left it; not, indeed, the best of the poets, whose representations are so completely artistic, that the sense is never perverted to positively mischievous ends, though the reader may miss the true sense. In the poem we have had under examination the true sense may be missed by many; but it is an offence only against taste—we mean literary taste. It is merely a sort of childish mistake to imagine that “Colin Clouts” was designed in any manner to refer to Queen Elizabeth, and does no visible injury in the world.

  In “Colin Clout,” as a piece from real life the ablest and most interesting poem which Spenser has left us, the place of landscape is filled in high allegorical style by a record of the Loves of the Rivers around his Irish home. But when he has to describe his voyage to England, all the poet awakes, and we have a picture of the sea, and of a vast royal ship of the day, which has never been surpassed in English literature.

Hymns of Love and Beauty, 1596

  In verse there are Edmund Spenser’s “Hymnes.” I cannot advise the allowance of other his poems as for practick English, no more than I can Jeffrey Chaucer, Lydgate, Pierce Plowman, or Laureate Skelton.

  Nowhere does his genius soar and sing with such continuous aspiration, nowhere is his phrase so decorously stately, though rising to an enthusiasm which reaches intensity while it stops short of vehemence, as in his “Hymns to Love and Beauty,” especially the latter. There is an exulting spurn of earth in it, as of a soul just loosed from its cage.

  Spenser’s two Hymns to Love and Beauty were the poetical fruits of his University education. These contain little that is original, but show a remarkable power of rendering the current philosophical ideas into clear and flowing verse. Visible things, the poet taught, following the main axiom of his master, are patterns of things invisible…. Beauty is not only an image of the Divine Mind, but an informing power in the soul.

  He has an adoration for beauty worthy of Dante and Plotinus. And this, because he never considers it a mere harmony of colour and form, but an emanation of unique, heavenly, imperishable beauty, which no mortal eye can see, and which is the prime work of the great Author of the worlds.

  The claim of Spenser to be considered as a sacred poet does by no means rest upon his hymns alone…. But whoever will attentively consider the “Fairy Queen” itself will find that it is, almost throughout, such as might have been expected from the author of those truly sacred hymns. It is a continual, deliberate endeavour to enlist the restless intellect and chivalrous feeling, of an inquiring and romantic age, on the side of goodness and faith, of purity and justice…. Spenser then was essentially a sacred poet; but the delicacy and insinuating gentleness of his disposition were better fitted to the veiled than the direct mode of instruction…. To Spenser therefore, upon the whole, the English reader must revert as being pre-eminently the sacred poet of his country.

Mother Hubbard’s Tale

  In this Poem we have a specimen of Spenser’s genius in Satire, a talent he very seldom exercised. This Fable is after the old manner of Chaucer, of whom it is an excellent imitation; and perhaps the antiquated style has no ill effect in improving the humour of the story: the morality of it is admirable. Every one will observe that keeness of wit, with which he has represented the arts of ill courtiers. In the description of a good courtier, which is so finely set off by the contrary characters, it is believed the author had in his view Sir Philip Sidney, of whom this seems to be a very just as well as beautiful picture.

  It is throughout an admirable imitation of Chaucer in his quieter or more familiar manner; there is indeed nothing else nearly so truly Chaucerian in our later English poetry.

  This is almost an open satire, and shows that if Spenser’s genius had not found a less mongrel style to disport itself in, not merely would Donne, and Lodge, and Hall, and Marston have had to abandon their dispute for the post of first English satirist, but the attainment of really great satire in English might have been hastened by a hundred years, and “Absalom and Achitophel” have been but a second.

  He who reads, in particular, “Mother Hubbard’s Tale” will gain a fair conception of the way in which Chaucer sounded to men of the sixteenth century. There are lines in this piece that lack the proper number of syllables. There are lines that are remarkable for nothing so much as for their lack of harmony. There are entire passages that are throughout written in what would strike us as a lame and halting metre. In a writer whose natural melody is almost cloying in its smoothness and sweetness, such a deviation from his usual practice could not be due to accident. It was the result of design. It was adopted for no other reason than that Chaucer was believed to have furnished the example of this sort of ruggedness in the measure.

A View of the State of Ireland, 1596

  In a country-house once belonging to the Desmonds on the banks of the Mulla, near Doneraile, the first three books of the “Faery Queen” were written; and here too the poet awoke to the sad realities of life, and has left us, in his “Account of the State of Ireland,” the most full and authentic document that illustrates its condition. This treatise abounds with judicious observations; but we regret the disposition to recommend an extreme severity in dealing with the native Irish, which ill becomes the sweetness of his muse.

  Spenser is the author of a sort of essay on the manners and antiquities of Ireland, which I prefer to his “Faerie Queene.”

  This state memorial still makes us regret that our poet only wrote verse: there is a charm in his sweet and voluble prose, a virgin grace which we have long lost in the artificial splendor of English diction. Here is no affectation of Chaucerian words: the gold is not spotted with rust. The vivid pictures of the poet, the curiosity of the antiquary, and, above all, a new model of policy of the practical politician, combine in this inestimable tract.

  Spenser shows in this work the temper of a statesmanly official, with breadth of mind for embracing the subject generally, and an active mastery and ready manipulation of ways and means: there is nothing in it of the unpractical dreamer, or the vaguely discursive smatterer.

  The author of “The Faery Queen” writes an excellent prose style. It is unaffected, clear, vigorous, straightforward. It exactly suits and serves its purpose. It does not play with words, or cultivate any verbal artifices. It is perfectly simple, and by its very simplicity impressive and forcible. Spenser “only speaks right on.” He is too much in earnest to be decorative or florid. He wishes to definitely instruct, and to move in a special direction those whom he addresses, not merely to entertain and please them. But being a great master of expression he accomplishes this latter end also, though it is not his prime object. His well-formed sentences and his trenchant phrases continually remind us that we are listening to an artist born and bred.

Miscellaneous Works

	Colins gone home, the glorie of his clime,
	The Muses Mirrour, and the Shepheard’s Saint.
	Spencer is ruined, of our later time
	The fairest ruine, Faeries foulest want:
	Then his Time ruines did our ruine show,
	Which by his ruine we untimely know:
	Spencer therfore thy Ruines were cal’d in,
	Too soone to sorrow least we should begin.

  One of the most finished and beautiful elegies in the English language.

  Out of the magic circle of the “Faerie Queen,” there is nothing so beautiful in Spenser as “Muiopotmos.” He is indeed the most poetical of entomologists. That winged Impersonation of Youth and Joy, holding in fee earth, middle-air, and heaven, seems a vision sent to reveal to us the secret of happiness lying among flowers spread far and wide over the domains of Innocence. There may we feast at will—so we dream—without sin and without surfeit—as upon dewey air from blossom-beds in purity exhaled. But till Death himself die, no breath is drawn apart from danger. Boy, sea-bold!—girl, starbright! Look—look—look there—Death at your arm and into your breast, crawling like a spider.

  He first shows his mature hand in the “Muiopotmos,” the most airily fanciful of his poems, a marvel for delicate conception and treatment, whose breezy verse seems to float between a blue sky and golden earth in imperishable sunshine. No other English poet has found the variety and compass which enlivened the octave stanza under his sensitive touch.

  Closely connected both with Gabriel Harvey and with Philip Sidney, he made certain experiments in applying the principle of syllabic “quantity” to English verse, of which it need only be said that they were not less uncouth and barbarous than those of his master at Cambridge.

Britain’s Ida

  Extremely like Keats with a mixture of the Shakspearian play on words.

  We are unwilling to exclude anything that has ever been imputed to Spenser; and although we are convinced, with T. Warton, that Spenser was not the author of “Brittain’s Ida,” as it is short, and possesses considerable merit of its own, we insert it. The reader will thus be able to form his own opinion. T. Walkley, who first printed it in 12mo. in 1628, only tells us that he was “certainly assured” that “it must be a work of Spenser’s;” but he furnishes no evidence beyond what is merely internal, unless we also take into account the assertion of the writer of the not ungraceful preliminary verses, “’tis learned Spenser’s Muse.” It has a much more modern air than anything else Spenser has left behind him, and we do not believe that it was produced, at the earliest, until near the close of the reign of James I: in St. xi of Canto iii. the author speaks of his “new-born quill.” The poem is not even an imitation of Spenser, nor, as far as we can judge, was it intended to be so.

General

  Sorry I am that I cannot find none other with whom I might couple him in this Catologue, in his rare gyft of Poetry: although one there is, though nowe long since seriously occupied ine grauer studies, (Master Gabriell Haruey) yet, as he was once his most special friende and fellow Poet, so because he hath taken such paynes, not onely in his Latin Poetry … but also to reforme our English verse … therefore wyll I aduenture to sette them together, as two of the rarest witts and learnedest masters of Poetrie in England.

	Yet lest my homespun verse obscure hir worth,
	Sweet Spencer let me leave this task to thee,
	Whose neverstooping quill can best set forth
	Such things of state, as passe my Muse and me.
	Thou, Spencer, art the alderliefest swaine,
	Or haply if that word be all to base,
	Thou art Apollo, whose sweet hunnie vaine
	Amongst the Muses hath a chiefest place.

Great Hobbinol on whom our shepherds gaze.

	Goe, weeping Truce-men, in your sighing weedes;
	Under a great Mecænas I have p(l)ast you:
	If so you come where learned Colin feedes
	His lovely flocke, packe thence, and quickly haste you:
	You are but mistes before so bright a sunne,
	Who hath the palme for deepe invention wunne.

	Dear Collin, let my Muse excused be,
	Which rudely thus presumes to sing by thee,
	Although her straines be harsh untun’d and ill,
	Nor can attayne to thy divinest skill.

	Colin, I know that in thy loftie wit
	Thou wilt but laugh at these my youthfull lines:
	Content I am they should in silence sit,
	Obscured from light to sing their sad designes;
	But that it pleasèd thy grave shepheardhood
	The Patron of my maiden verse to bee,
	When I in doubt of raging envie stood,
	Ana now I waigh not who shall Chloris see:
	For fruit before it comes to full perfection
	But blossoms is, as every man doth know:
	So these being bloomes, and under thy protection,
	In time, I hope, to ripenes more will grow.
	And so I leave thee to thy woorthy muse,
	Desiring thee all faults heere to excuse.

	At Colin’s feet I throw my yeelding reed;
	But let the rest win homage by their deed.

	Spenser to me, whose deep Conceit is such,
	As passing all conceit needs no defence.

  Maister Spenser, following the counsel of Tully in “De Oratore” for reviving of ancient words, hath adorned his own style with that beauty and gravity which Tully speaks of, and his much frequenting of Chaucer’s ancient speeches causeth many to allow far better of him than otherwise they would.

	Spenser, to me, whose deep conceit is such,
	As, passing all conceit, needs no defence.

	Fairy Queen show fairest Queen
	How her fair in thee is seen;
	Shepherd’s Calender set down
	How to figure best a clown.
	As for Mother Hubbert’s Tale,
	Crack the nut and leave the shale;
	And for other works of worth
	(All too good to wander forth),
	Grieve that ever you were wrote,
	And your author be forgot.

	Iud.  A sweeter Swan than ever song in Po,
	A shriller Nightingale then ever blest
	The prouder groves of selfe admiring Rome.
	Blith was each vally, and each sheapeard proud,
	While he did chaunt his rurall minstralsie.
	Attentive was full many a dainty eare.
	Nay, hearers hung upon his melting tong,
	While sweetly of his Faiery Queene he song,
	While to the waters fall he tun’d (her) fame,
	And in each barke engrav’d Eliza’s name.
	And yet for all this, unregarding soile
	Unlac’t the line of his desired life,
	Denying mayntenance for his deare reliefe,
	Carelesse (ere) to prevent his exequy,
	Scarce deigning to shut up his dying eye.
	Ing.  Pity it is that gentler witts should breed,
	Where thick skin chuffes laugh at a schollers need
	But softly may our (Homer’s) ashes rest,
	That lie by mery Chancer’s noble chest.

	Famous aliue, and dead, here is the ods,
	Then God of Poets, nowe Poet of the Gods.

	Albions Mæonian Homer, natures pride,
	Spenser, the Muses sonne and sole delight,
	If thou couldst through Dianas kingdome glide,
	Passing the Palace of infernall night,
	(The sentinels that keepe thee from the light)
	Yet couldst thou not his retchlesse worth comprise,
	Whose minde containes a thousand purities.

	… Colin Clout began to tune his quill
	With such deepe Art, that euery one was giuen
	To think Apollo (newly slid from heau’n)
	Had tane a human shape to win his loue,
	Or with the Westerne Swaines for glory stroue.
	He sung th’ heroicke Knights of Faiery land
	In lines so elegant, of such command,
	That had the Thracian plaid but halfe so well,
	He had not left Eurydice in hell.
	*        *        *        *        *
	Diuinest Spencer heau’n-bred, happy Muse!
	Would any power into my braine infuse
	Thy worth, or all that Poets had before,
	I could not praise till thou deseru’st no more.

  Spenser’s stanzaes pleased him not, nor his matter; the meaning of which Allegorie he had delivered in papers to Sir Walter Raughlie.

	Grave moral Spenser after these came on,
	Than whom I am persuaded there was none,
	Since the blind bard his Iliads up did make,
	Fitter a task like that to undertake;
	To set down boldly, bravely to invent,
	In all high knowledge surely excellent.

  Our sage and serious Poet Spenser, whom I dare be known to think a better teacher than Scotus or Aquinas.

  An excellent scholar; but especially most happy in English Poetry, as his works do declare; in which the many Chaucerisms used (for I will not say affected by him) are thought by the ignorant to be blemishes, known by the Learned to be beauties to his book; which notwithstanding had been more saleable, if more conformed to our modern language.

Whose purple blush the day foreshows.

  The religion of the Gentiles had been woven into the contexture of all the ancient poetry with a very agreeable mixture, which made moderns affect to give that of Christianity a place also in their poems. But the true religion was not found to become fiction so well as a false had done, and all their attempts of this kind seemed rather to debase religion than to heighten poetry. Spenser endeavoured to supply this with morality, and to make instruction, instead of story, the subject of an epic poem. His execution was excellent, and his flights of fancy very noble and high, but his design was poor, and his moral lay so bare, that it lost the effect; it is true, the pill was gilded, but so thin that the colour and the taste were too easily discovered.

  Spenser may be reckoned the first of our heroic poets. He had a large spirit, a sharp judgment, and a genius for heroic poetry, perhaps above any that ever wrote since Virgil, but our misfortune is, he wanted a true idea, and lost himself by following an unfaithful guide. Tho’ besides Homer and Virgil, he had read Tasso, yet he rather suffered himself to be misled by Ariosto, with whom blindly rambling on marvels and adventures, he makes no conscience of probability; all is fanciful and chimerical, without any uniformity, or without any foundation in truth; in a word his poem is perfect Fairy-Land.

  Milton has acknowledged to me that Spenser was his original.

Spenser himself affects the Obsolete.

  A Writer in so endearing, and amiable a Vein, that, if I may judge of Others by my self, ’tis impossible to read his Works, without being in Love with the Author; without the greatest Curiosity to inquire into the Circumstances of his Life; or feeling the whole Soul interested in his good or evil Fortune…. No Writer ever found so near a Way to the Heart as He, and there is scarce a Beauty in his Verses, that has not the peculiar Happiness of recommending the Author to our Friendship, as well as our Admiration. For my own Part, when I read Him, I fancy myself conversing with the Graces, and am led away as irresistibly, as if enchanted by his own Merlin.

  No writer ever found a nearer way to the heart than he, and his verses have a peculiar happiness of recommending the author to our friendship as well as raising our admiration; one cannot read him without fancying oneself transported into Fairy Land, and there conversing with the Graces, in that enchanted region: In elegance of thinking and fertility of imagination, few of our English authors have approached him, and no writers have such power as he to awake the spirit of poetry in others. Cowley owns that he derived inspiration from him; and I have heard the celebrated Mr. James Thomson, the author of the Seasons, and justly esteemed one of our best descriptive poets, say, that he formed himself upon Spenser.

  With all his faults, no poet enlarges the imagination more than Spenser. Cowley was formed into poetry by reading him; and many of our modern writers, such as Gray, Akenside, and others, seemed to have studied his manner with the utmost attention; from him their compounded epithets, and solemn flow of numbers, seem evidently borrowed; and the verses of Spenser may, perhaps, one day be considered the standard of English poetry.

	Is this the land, where, on our Spenser’s tongue,
	Enamour’d of his voice, Description hung?

  Spenser was learned in Latin and Greek, as well as in Italian. But either the fashion of the times, or some deficiency in his own taste, inclined him to prefer the modern to the ancient models. His genius was comprehensive and sublime, his style copious, his sense of harmony delicate: and nothing seems to have been wanting to make him a poet of the highest rank, but a more intimate acquaintance with the classic authors.

  John Bunyan in rhyme.

	… that gentle Bard,
	Chosen by the Muses for their Page of State—
	Sweet Spenser, moving through his clouded heaven
	With the moon’s beauty and the moon’s soft pace,
	I called him Brother, Englishman, and Friend!

  The prince of English poets.

	… my Spenser, who so well could sing
	The passions all, their bearings and their ties;
	Who could in view those shadowy beings bring,
	And with bold hand remove each dark disguise,
	Wherein love, hatred, scorn, or anger lies.

  But Spenser I could have read forever. Too young to trouble myself about the allegory, I considered all the knights and ladies and dragons and giants in their outward and exoteric sense; and God only knows how delighted I was to find myself in such society. As I had always a wonderful facility in retaining in my memory whatever verses pleased me, the quantity of Spenser’s stanzas which I could repeat was really marvellous.

  When I began “Childe Harold,” I had never tried Spenser’s measure, and now I cannot scribble in any other.

  Spenser is rich and picturesque; his lyrics breathe an idyllic tenderness, and his muse is altogether redolent of the old Troubadours. Not his poetic treatment alone, his very language bears striking resemblance to the old German chivalric and love-song.

	To one who had by Mulla’s stream
	Fondled the maidens with the breasts of cream;
	Who had beheld Belphœbe in a brook,
	And lovely Una in a leafy nook,
	And Archimago leaning o’er his book:
	Who had of all that’s sweet tasted, and seen,
	From silv’ry ripple, up to beauty’s queen;
	From the sequester’d haunts of gay Titania,
	To the blue dwelling of divine Urania.

  In Spenser, indeed, we trace a mind constitutionally tender, delicate, and, in comparison with his three great compeers, I had almost said effeminate; and this additionally saddened by the unjust persecution of Burleigh, and the severe calamities, which overwhelmed his latter days. These causes have diffused over all his compositions “a melancholy grace,” and have drawn forth occasional strains the more pathetic from their gentleness. But nowhere do we find the least trace of irritability, and still less of quarrelsome or affected contempt of his censurers.

  His command of imagery is wide, easy, and luxuriant. He threw the soul of harmony into our verse, and made it more warmly, tenderly, and magnificently descriptive than it ever was before, or, with a few exceptions, than it has ever been since. It must certainly be owned that in description he exhibits nothing of the brief strokes and robust power which characterize the very greatest poets; but we shall nowhere find more airy and expansive images of visionary things, a sweeter tone of sentiment, or a finer flush in the colours of language, than in this Rubens of English poetry. His fancy teems exuberantly in minuteness of circumstances, like a fertile soil sending bloom and verdure through the utmost extremities of the foliage which it nourishes.

  I was and am villainously ignorant of him; but I have bought him in folio and intend to read him piece-meal.

  Spenser’s great characteristic is poetic luxury. If you go to him for a story, you will be disappointed; if for a style, classical or concise, the point against him is conceded; if for pathos, you must weep for personages half-real and too beautiful; if for mirth, you must laugh out of good breeding, and because it pleaseth the great, sequestered man to be facetious. But if you love poetry well enough to enjoy it for its own sake, let no evil reports of his “allegory” deter you from his acquaintance, for great will be your loss…. Any true lover of poetry, when he comes to know him, would as soon quarrel with repose on the summer grass…. Spenser is the farthest removed from the ordinary cares and haunts of the world of all the poets that ever wrote, except perhaps Ovid…. He is not so great a poet as Shakspeare or Dante;—he has less imagination, though more fancy, than Milton…. His remoteness from everyday life is the reason perhaps why Somers and Chatham admired him; and his possession of every kind of imaginary wealth completes his charm with his brother poets. Take him in short for what he is, whether great or less than his fellows, the poetical faculty is so abundantly and beautifully predominant in him above every other, though he had passion, and thought, and plenty of ethics, and was as learned a man as Ben Jonson, perhaps as Milton himself, that he has always been felt by his countrymen to be what Charles Lamb called him, the “Poet’s Poet.” He has had more idolatry and imitation from his brethren than all the rest put together. The old undramatic poets, Drayton, Browne, Drummond, Giles and Phineas Fletcher, were as full of him as the dramatic were of Shakspeare. Milton studied and used him, calling him the “sage and serious Spenser;” and adding, that he “dared be known to think him a better teacher than Scotus or Aquinas.” Cowley said that he became a poet by reading him. Dryden claimed him for a master. Pope said he read him with as much pleasure when he was old, as young, Collins and Gray loved him; Thomson, Shenstone, and a host of inferior writers, expressly imitated him; Burns, Byron, Shelley, and Keats made use of his stanza; Coleridge eulogized him; and he is as dear to the best living poets as he was to their predecessors. Spenser has stood all the changes in critical opinion; all the logical and formal conclusions of the understanding, as opposed to imagination and lasting sympathy.

	Lakes where the sunsheen is mystic with splendour and softness;
	Vales where sweet life is all Summer with golden romance;
	Forests that glimmer with twilight round revel-bright palaces;
	Here in our May-blood we wander, careering ’mongst ladies and knights.

  Lord Chatham, according to Mrs. A. Pitt, was always reading Spencer…. She told Mr. Grattan that he had never read but one book,—“The Faëry Queene.”… “He who knows Spencer,” says Burke, “has a good hold on the English tongue.” (Fox) liked a book of Spenser exceedingly, before something else.

  But if Spenser’s imagination was not comprehensive, precise, and bold, it was fertile, rich, and various. If he was destitute of profound passion and warm sympathy with his kind, he manifests a natural gentleness, a noble sentiment, and an exquisite moral purity, which thoroughly engage our interest and our esteem. The most characteristic quality of his mind is undoubtedly sensibility to beauty. This may account for whatever want of originality there may seem to be in his compositions, and for his dealing so little with real human concerns. Such a susceptibility would lead him to repose, rather than to action; to accept readily traditions of all sorts; to stand aloof from the harsh and vulgar facts of actual life; to linger among the mellow scenes of the past and in the twilight realms of fancy; to dream over the ruins of time, obsolete institutions, and creeds outworn. Most peculiar is the modification which this faculty, combined with moral purity, gives to his love of woman. Voluptuous though this be, it is ever controlled and chastened by a predominant feeling of the beauty of holiness. Spenser’s most extraordinary power is that of language, the power of conveying impressions by sounds. It is through the ear more than the eye that he achieves his triumphs, and he makes up by his mastery over this art for many other deficiencies. The pathos of his verse affects us when his sentiments do not. In him more than in any other of our poets do music and sweet poetry agree; one of the arts is complementary to the other, and he produces some of the effects of both. No instrument known before his time was capable of expressing his deep and complex harmonies, and he invented one which many a genius has since touched skilfully, but none with the hand of the master, who, through nearly four thousand stanzas, adapted it to a great variety of subjects and proved it equal to all.

  Spenser’s verse is fluid and rapid, no doubt, but there are more ways than one of being fluid and rapid, and Homer is fluid and rapid in quite another way than Spenser. Spenser’s manner is no more Homeric than is the manner of the one modern inheritor of Spenser’s beautiful gift; the poet, who evidently caught from Spenser his sweet and easy-slipping movement, and who has exquisitely employed it; a Spenserian genius, nay, a genius by natural endowment richer probably than even Spenser; that light which shines so unexpected and without fellow in our century, an Elizabethan born too late, the early lost and admirably gifted Keats.

  Spenser was reproached in his own time with an excess of archaisms; but the real fault of his diction lies rather in the use of forms and expressions which had become obsolete because they deserved to perish, for which no good authority could be cited, and which were, probably, unauthorized coinages of the inferior poets from whom Spenser took them, or in many cases perhaps licenses of his own. In the employment of words of these classes, he is often far from happy, but in the mastery of the true English of his time, in acute sensibility of ear and exquisite skill in the musical arrangement of words, he has no superior in the whole compass of English literature…. The most striking peculiarity of Spenser’s diction is analogous to that which I have before mentioned as one of Chaucer’s greatest merits—a rare felicity in verbal combinations—and in Spenser it chiefly consists in a very nice sense of congruity in the choice and application of epithets. His adjectives not only qualify the noun, but they are so adapted to it, that they heighten or intensify its appropriate meaning; and they are often used with a reference to the radical sense of the noun, which shows that Spenser knew how to press even etymology into use as a means of the embellishment of poetical diction. The “Faery Queene” is at present more studied, I believe, than it was a century since; but the “Shepherd’s Calendar,” which is less familiarly known, is full of most exquisite poetry, and the minor works of Spenser are scarcely less interesting to the reader of taste, and to the philologist, than his great allegorical epic.

  Spenser’s chaste soul.

  He is always imaging; it is his specialty. He has but to close his eyes, and apparitions arise; they abound in him, crowd, overflow; in vain he pours them forth; they continually float up, more copious and more dense. Many times, following the inexhaustible stream, I have thought of the vapours which rise incessantly from the sea, ascend, sparkle, commingle their gold and snowy scrolls, while beneath them new mists arise, and others again beneath, and the splendid procession never grows dim or ceases…. He is epic, that is, a narrator, and not a singer like an ode-writer, nor a mimic like a playwriter. No modern is more like Homer. Like Homer and the great epic-writers, he presents consecutive and noble, almost classical images, so nearly ideas, that the mind seizes them unaided and unawares. Like Homer, he is always simple and clear: he makes no leap, he omits no argument, he robs no word of its primitive and ordinary sense, he preserves the natural sequence of ideas. Like Homer again, he is redundant, ingenuous, even childish. He says everything, he puts down reflections which we have made beforehand; he repeats without limit his ornamental epithets. We can see that he beholds objects in a beautiful uniform light, with infinite detail; that he wishes to show all this detail, never fearing to see his happy dream change or disappear; that he traces its outline with a regular movement, never hurrying or slackening. He is even a little prolix, too unmindful of the public, too ready to lose himself and fall into a dream. His thought expands in vast repeated comparisons, like those of the old Ionic poet.

  There is much in Spenser that is contemporary and evanescent; but the substance of him is durable, and his work was the deliberate result of intelligent purpose and ample culture…. The cold obstruction of two centuries thaws, and the stream of speech once more let loose, seeks out its old windings, or overflows musically in unpractised channels. The service which Spenser did to our literature by this exquisite sense of harmony is incalculable. His fine ear, abhorrent of barbarous dissonance, his dainty tongue that loves to prolong the relish of a musical phrase, made possible the transition from the cast-iron stiffness of “Ferrex and Porrex” to the Damascus pliancy of Fletcher and Shakespeare…. The language and verse of Spenser at his best have an ideal lift in them, and there is scarce any of our poets who can so hardly help being poetical…. Spenser was an epicure in language. He loved “seld-seen costly” words perhaps too well, and did not always distinguish between mere strangeness and that novelty which is so agreeable as to cheat us with some charm of seeming association. He had not the concentrated power which can sometimes pack infinite riches in the little room of a single epithet, for his genius is rather for dilation than compression. But he was, with the exception of Milton and possibly Gray, the most learned of our poets. His familiarity with ancient and modern literature was easy and intimate, and as he perfected himself in his art, he caught the grand manner and highbred ways of the society he frequented. But even to the last he did not quite shake off the blunt rusticity of phrase that was habitual with the generation that preceded him.

  With all one’s allegiance to Spenser, it is trying to feel, much more to think, one’s way through the tropically thorny luxuriance of his language.

  Spenser’s poetry is indeed the precise antipodes of Pope’s, and its tender romance aimed against all those canons of common sense in which Johnson was the sturdiest of believers. For that reason his fairyland was a delightful retreat for poets weary with the prevailing rigidity of form and coldness of sentiment. Steele had tried to bring Spenser into notice in the “Tatler” and “Spectator.” Thomson’s charming “Castle of Indolence” and Shenstone’s “Schoolmistress” were popular echoes of Spenser’s style; Beattie makes his “Minstrel” confute Hume in Spenserian stanzas; William Thompson, Gilbert West, the defender of the Resurrection, Lloyd, the friend of Colman, Wilkie, of the “Epigoniad,” Mickle, the translator of Camoens, and Cambridge, best known by the “Scribleriad,” all wrote imitations of more or less elaborate kind; Collins loved Spenser, and Gray paid him a more discriminating homage than that of sheer imitation, for he never wrote a line himself without attuning his mind by first reading Spenser for a considerable time. Pope himself, it may be noticed, was a lover of Spenser in his boyhood, though a coarse burlesque seems to imply that he regarded him with no particular reverence. In fact, the poets of the eighteenth century, with one or two exceptions, show a disposition to edge away from the types which they professed to admit as ideally correct.

  Spenser’s perception of beauty of all kinds was singularly and characteristically quick and sympathetic. It was one of his great gifts; perhaps the most special and unstinted. Except Shakespere, who had it with other and greater gifts, no one in that time approached to Spenser, in feeling the presence of that commanding and mysterious idea, compounded of so many things, yet of which the true secret escapes us still, to which we give the name of beauty. A beautiful scene, a beautiful person, a beautiful poem, a mind and character with that combination of charms, which, for want of another word, we call by that half-spiritual, half-material word “beautiful,” at once set his imagination at work to respond to it and reflect it. His means of reflecting it were as abundant as his sense of it was keen. They were only too abundant. They often betrayed him by their affluence and wonderful readiness to meet his call.

  In readiness of descriptive power, in brightness and variety of imagery, and in flow of diction, Chaucer remained unequalled by any English poet, till he was surpassed—it seems not too much to say, in all three respects—by Spenser.

  No man ever set thought to sweeter music, and there are some who are content with a mere enjoyment of the outward charm of Spenser’s manner, as if that were all. But Spenser was the Elizabethan Milton, Puritan like Milton with no narrow zeal against the innocent delights of life, but with grand yearning for the victory of man over all that opposed his maintenance of a pure soul obedient to God in a pure body obedient to the laws of Nature. Shakespeare was universal poet. He saw through the accidents of life to its essentials. But the accidents of his time are never out of Spenser’s verse. He is a combatant poet.

  To Chaucer a beautiful woman is a beautiful creature of this good earth, and is often nothing more; her beauty suddenly slays the tender heart of her lover, or she makes glad the spirit of man as though with some light, bright wine. She is more blissful to look on than “the new perjonette tree,” and softer than the wether’s wool; her mouth is sweet as “apples laid in hay or heath;” her body is gent and small as any weasel. For Spenser behind each woman, made to worship or to love, rises a sacred presence—womanhood itself. Her beauty of face and limb is but a manifestation of the invisible beauty, and this is of one kin with the Divine Wisdom and the Divine Love. In the poet of Edward’s reign a gay and familiar side of chivalry is presented, which existed in life and in art and literature along with that chivalry which was the mysticism of human passion. The more modern poet retains of chivalry only what is exalted, serious, and tender.

  He is one of those few who can challenge the title of “greatest English poet,” and the reader may almost of right demand the opinion on this point of any one who writes about him. For my part I have no intention of shirking the difficulty. It seems to me that putting Shakespere aside as hors concours, not merely in degree but in kind, only two English poets can challenge Spenser for the primacy. These are Milton and Shelley. The poet of “The Faërie Queene” is generally inferior to Milton in the faculty of concentration, and in the minting of those monumental phrases, impressive of themselves and quite apart from the context, which often count highest in the estimation of poetry. His vocabulary and general style, if not more remote from the vernacular, have sometimes a touch of deliberate estrangement from that vernacular which is no doubt of itself a fault. His conception of a great work is looser, more excursive, less dramatic. As compared with Shelley he lacks not merely the modern touches which appeal to a particular age, but the lyrical ability in which Shelley has no equal among English poets. But in each case he redeems these defects with, as it seems to me, far more than counterbalancing merits. He is never prosaic as Milton, like his great successor Wordsworth constantly is, and his very faults are the faults of a poet. He never (as Shelley does constantly) dissolves away into a flux of words which simply bids good-bye to sense or meaning, and wanders on at large, unguided, without an end, without an aim.

  And thus the first poet of the new era was yet more emphatically the last poet of the old—at once the morning star of England’s later, and the evening star of her earlier literature…. Where Spenser is himself, the greatness of his ideal hangs around his poetry like the halo round the head of a saint. His poetry has that gift without which all others, including even that of imagination itself, leaves it but a maimed and truncated thing—a torso without a head. It has a soul. In this respect Spenser was as like Tasso as he was unlike Ariosto, whom he too often imitated, but from whom he derived little save harm…. I cannot but believe that those stains on the surface of Spenser’s poetry which, though seldom snares to moral principle, are serious insults to moral taste, and need to be stepped over like bad spots on a road, came to him from the coarseness of the age in which he lived, and to which the great Elizabethan drama, excepting in the main Shakespeare, bears so deplorable a witness.

	O master, it was not on oaten reeds
	Thou madest music for the world’s delight,
	Nor yet on Pan’s shrill pipe didst thou e’er flute;
	To sing of courtly grace and lordly deeds,
	Of lovely Una and the Redcross Knight,
	Behold! thou hadst Apollo’s silver lute.

  No English poets have surpassed Spenser, in a melodious marshalling of words.

  Spenser stands alone, the one supremely great undramatic poet of a play-writing time. In his youth he had, indeed, composed nine comedies, now lost, but the quality of his genius was apart from the dramatic temper of his greatest poetical contemporaries. With a wonderful richness and fluency of poetic utterance, with the painter’s feeling for color, and the musician’s ear for melody, Spenser lacked the sense of humor, the firm grasp of actual life, indispensable to the successful dramatist.

  Of all the nobly endowed men of his time he was the most spiritual. One feels in him that marvelous identification of the saint and the artist which gives the work of Fra Angelico a kind of spiritual radiance.

  The opulence of Spenser’s muse will always be the despair of the anthologist.

  Heaven pardon me! I do not care much for Spenser.

  Great poet as Spenser was, yet his landscape disappoints us. It seems to form an exception—we might perhaps call it a reaction—from the general quality of the English Nature-poetry we have been surveying.

  Generally speaking, during the first half of the seventeenth century the genius of the author of the “Faerie Queene” is a far more potent influence in English literature than that of the author of “Hamlet.”

  The place of Spenser in the History of Poetry is a very peculiar one. He cannot be ranked with the great poets whose universal ideas, applicable to human nature in all times and places, raised them to the empyrean of imagination—with Homer and Dante and Shakespeare. He cannot be ranked with that great, though secondary, order of inventors whose penetrating insight pierces through the outward shows surrounding them in their own age to the ideal truth of things—with Chaucer, Ariosto, and Cervantes. In most respects his position in the world of imagination is analogous to the position of Sidney in the world of action. Both were inspired by ideals springing out of a decaying order of society; and the same environment of circumstance which prevented Sidney from putting his theories of knighthood into practice gave an appearance of unreality to Spenser’s epical conceptions…. Whatever virtue there is in the subject-matter of Spenser’s poetry, proceeds not from the ideas themselves so much as from the mind of the poet.

  It is neither possible nor wise to attempt here a catalogue of books especially adapted to children. I should myself put Spenser high in the list.

  Lyrics in these forms reach their chief perfection, perhaps, in the more literary poets, such as Spenser, Daniel, Drayton, Browne, Drummond, and Milton. In Spenser’s “Epithalamion” and the “Four Hymns,” especially, is exemplified what has been called the Greater Lyric, the long-breathed lyric of elaborate involutions in subject-matter and in metrical form, which in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries is represented principally by the formal ode, Pindaric and otherwise. No one in English has managed this difficult form of art with such constancy of poetic inspiration, and such unfailing harmony of the parts and of the whole, as has Spenser.

  Spenser’s poetry is the very mirror of the times at their best. Its bright and chivalric spirit scorns money as much as it cherishes what money brings.