Senza la qual chi sua vita consuma,
Cotal vestigio in terra di se lascia

Qual fumo in aere ed in acqua la schiuma."*

"Whoso in pomp of proud estate, quoth she,
Does swim, and bathes himself in courtly bliss,
Does waste his days in dark obscurity

And in oblivion ever buried is ;

Where ease abounds it's eath to do amiss:
But who his limbs with labours and his mind
Behaves with cares, cannot so easy miss.
Abroad in arms, at home in studious kind,
Who seeks with painful toil shall Honour soonest find.

"In woods, in waves, in wars, she wonts to dwell,

And will be found with peril and with pain,

Ne can the man that moulds in idle cell

Unto her happy mansiön attain ;

Before her gate high God did Sweat ordain,
And wakeful watches ever to abide;

But easy is the way and passage plain

To pleasure's palace; it may soon be spied,

And day and night her doors to all stand open wide."+

Spenser's mind always demands this large elbow-room. His thoughts are never pithily expressed, but with a stately and sonorous proclamation, as if under the open sky, that seems to me very noble. For example

* Inferno, xxiv., 46-52.

"For sitting upon down,

Or under quilt, one cometh not to fame,
Withouten which whoso his life consumeth
Such vestige leaveth of himself on earth
As smoke in air or in the water foam."

-LONGFELLOW.

It shows how little Dante was read during the last century that none of the commentators on Spenser notice his most important obligations to the great Tuscan.

"Faery Queen," B. II., c. iii., 40, 41.

"The noble heart that harbours virtuous thought
And is with child of glorious-great intent

Can never rest until it forth have brought
The eternal brood of glory excellent."*

One's very soul seems to dilate with that last verse.
is a passage which Milton had read and remembered :-

"And is there care in Heaven? and is there love

In heavenly spirits to these creatures base,
That may compassion of their evils move?
There is: else much more wretched were the case
Of man than beasts: but O, the exceeding grace
Of highest God, that loves his creatures so,
And all his works with mercy doth embrace,
That blessed angels he sends to and fro,
To serve to wicked man, to serve his wicked foe!

"How oft do they their silver bowers leave,

To come to succour us that succour want!
How oft do they with golden pinions cleave
The fleeting skies like flying pursuivant,
Against foul fiends to aid us militant!

They for us fight, they watch and duly ward,

And here

And their bright squadrons round about us plant;

And all for love and nothing for reward;

Q, why should heavenly God to men have such regard?"+

you come

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 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

* Ibid., B. I., c. v., 1. + Ibid., B. II., c. viii., 1, 2.

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 characterise 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. But he has characterised and exemplified his own style better than any description could do:

"For round about the walls yclothed were

With goodly arras of great majesty,

Woven with gold and silk so close and near
That the rich metal lurked privily

As faining to be hid from envious eye;

Yet here and there and everywhere, unwares

It showed itself and shone unwillingly

Like to a discoloured snake whose hidden snares

Through the green grass his long bright-burnished back
declares." *

And of the lulling quality of his verse take this as a sample:

"And, more to lull him in his slumber soft,

A trickling stream from high rock tumbling down
And ever drizzling rain upon the loft,

Mixt with the murmuring wind much like the soun
Of swarming bees did cast him in a swoon.
No other noise, nor peoples' troublous cries,
As still are wont to annoy the walled town,

Might there be heard: but careless quiet lies
Wrapt in eternal silence far from enemies."+

In the world into which Spenser carries us there is neither time nor space, or rather it is outside of and independent of them both, and so is purely ideal, or, more truly, imaginary; † B. I., c. i., 41.

* B. III., c. xi., 28.

yet it is full of form, colour, and all earthly luxury, and so far, if not real, yet apprehensible by the senses. There are no men and women in it, yet it throngs with airy and immortal shapes that have the likeness of men and women, and hint at some kind of foregone reality. Now this place, somewhere between mind and matter, between soul and sense, between the actual and the possible, is precisely the region which Spenser assigns (if I have rightly divined him) to the poetic susceptibility of impression

"To reign in the air from earth to highest sky."

Underneath every one of the senses lies the soul and spirit of it, dormant till they are magnetised by some powerful emotion. Then whatever is imperishable in us recognises for an instant and claims kindred with something outside and distinct from it, yet in some inconceivable way a part of it, that flashes back on it an ideal beauty which impoverishes all other companionship. This exaltation with which love sometimes subtilises the nerves of coarsest men so that they feel and see, not the thing as it seems to others, but the beauty of it, the joy of it, the soul of eternal youth that is in it, would appear to have been the normal condition of Spenser. While the senses of most men live in the cellar, his "were laid in a large upper chamber which opened toward the sunrising."

"His birth was of the womb of morning dew,

And his conception of the joyous prime."

The very greatest poets (and is there, after all, more than one of them?) have a way, I admit, of getting within our inmost consciousness and in a manner betraying us to ourselves. There is in Spenser a remoteness very different from this, but it is also a seclusion, and quite as agreeable, perhaps quite as wholesome in certain moods when we are glad to get away from ourselves and those importunate trifles which we gravely call the realities of life. In the warm Mediterranean of his mind everything

"Suffers a sea-change

Into something rich and strange."

He lifts everything, not beyond recognition, but to an ideal distance where no mortal, I had almost said human, fleck is visible. Instead of the ordinary bridal gifts, he hallows his wife with an Epithalamion fit for a conscious goddess, and the "savage soil"* of Ireland becomes a turf of Arcady under her feet, where the merchants' daughters of the town are no more at home than the angels and the fair shapes of pagan mythology whom they meet there. He seems to have had a common-sense side to him, and could look at things (if we may judge by his tract on Irish affairs) in a practical and even hard way; but the moment he turned toward poetry he fulfilled the condition which his teacher Plato imposes on poets, and had not a particle of prosaic understanding left.

His fancy, habitually moving about in words not realised, unrealises everything at a touch. The critics blame him because in his Prothalamion the subjects of it enter on the Thames as swans and leave it at Temple Gardens as noble damsels; but to those who are grown familiar with his imaginary world such a transformation seems as natural as in the old legend of the Knight of the Swan.

"Come, now, ye damsels, daughters of Delight,

Help quickly her to dight:

Crown ye god Bacchus with a coronal,

And Hymen also crown with wreaths of vine,
And let the Graces dance unto the rest-

For they can do it best.

The whiles the maidens do their carols sing,

To which the woods shall answer and their echo ring."

* This phrase occurs in the sonnet addressed to the Earl of Ormond, and in that to Lord Grey de Wilton in the series prefixed to the "Faery Queen." These sonnets are of a much stronger build than the "Amoretti," and some of them (especially that to Sir John Norris) recall the firm tread of Milton's, though differing in structure.