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 delicatelysurfaced nature of his which was its mirror and counterpart. Sadness was alien to him, and at funerals he was, to be sure, a decorous mourner, as could not fail with so sympathetic a temperament; but his condolences are graduated to the unimpassioned scale of social requirement. Even for Sir Philip Sidney his sighs are regulated by the official standard. It was in an unreal world that his affections found their true object and vent, and it is in an elegy of a lady whom he had never known, that he puts into the mouth of a husband whom he has evaporated into a shepherd, the two most naturally pathetic verses he ever penned :

"I hate the day because it lendeth light

To see all things, but not my love to see.'

In the "Epithalamion" there is an epithet which has been much admired for its felicitous tenderness :

"Behold, whiles she before the altar stands,
Hearing the holy priest that to her speakes
And blesseth her with his two happy hands.”

But the purely impersonal passion of the artist had already guided him to this lucky phrase. It is addressed by Holinessa dame surely as far abstracted from the enthusiasms of love as we can readily conceive of-to Una, who, like the visionary Helen of Dr. Faustus, has every charm of womanhood, except that of being alive, as Juliet and Beatrice are.

"O happy earth,

Whereon thy innocent feet do ever tread!"t

Can we conceive of Una, the fall of whose foot would be as soft as that of a rose-leaf upon its mates already fallen-can we

* "Daphnaida," 407, 408.

"Faery Queen," B. I., c. x., 9.

conceive of her treading anything so sordid? No; it is only on some unsubstantial floor of dream that she walks securely, herself a dream. And it is only when Spenser has escaped thither, only when this glamour of fancy has rarefied his wife till she is grown almost as purely a creature of the imagination as the other ideal images with which he converses, that his feeling becomes as nearly passionate—as nearly human, I was on the point of saying-as with him is possible. I am so far from blaming this idealising property of his mind, that I find it admirable in him. It is his quality, not his defect. Without some touch of it life would be unendurable prose. If I have called the world to which he transports us a world of unreality, I have wronged him. It is only a world of unrealism. It is from pots and pans and stocks and futile gossip and inchlong politics that he emancipates us, and makes us free of that to-morrow, always coming and never come, where ideas shall reign supreme.* But I am keeping my readers from the sweetest idealisation that love ever wrought :

"Unto this place whenas the elfin knight

Approached, him seemed that the merry sound
Of a shrill pipe, he playing heard on height,
And many feet fast thumping the hollow ground,
That through the woods their echo did rebound;
He nigher drew to wit what it mote be.
There he a troop of ladies dancing found
Full merrily and making gladful glee;

And in the midst a shepherd piping he did see.

"He durst not enter into the open green

For dread of them unwares to be descried,
For breaking of their dance, if he were seen;

But in the covert of the wood did bide

Beholding all, yet of them unespied;

There he did see that pleased so much his sight

* Strictly taken, perhaps his world is not much more imaginary than that of other epic poets, Homer (in the Iliad) included. He who is familiar with medieval epics will be extremely cautious in drawing inferences as to contemporary manners from Homer. He evidently archaises like the rest.

That even he himself his eyes envied,
A hundred naked maidens lily-white,
All ranged in a ring and dancing in delight.

"All they without were ranged in a ring,

And danced round; but in the midst of them
Three other ladies did both dance and sing,
The while the rest them round about did hem,
And like a garland did in compass stem.

And in the midst of these same three was placed
Another damsel, as a precious gem

Amidst a ring most richly well enchased,

That with her goodly presence all the rest much graced.

"Look how the crown which Ariadne wove

Upon her ivory forehead that same day,
That Theseus her unto his bridal bore

(When the bold Cantaurs made that bloody fray,
With the fierce Lapithes, that did them dismay),

Being now placed in the firmament,

Through the bright heaven doth her beams display, And is unto the stars an ornament,

Which round about her move in order excellent ;

"Such was the beauty of this goodly band,

Whose sundry parts were here too long to tell,
But she that in the midst of them did stand,
Seemed all the rest in beauty to excel,
Crowned with a rosy garland that right well
Did her beseem. And, ever as the crew

About her danced, sweet flowers that far did smell,
And fragrant odours they upon her threw;
But most of all those three did her with gifts endue.

"Those were the graces, Daughters of Delight,
Handmaids of Venus, which are wont to haunt
Upon this hill and dance there, day and night;
Those three to men all gifts of grace do grant
And all that Venus in herself doth vaunt
Is borrowed of them; but that fair one
That in the midst was placed paravant,
Was she to whom that shepherd piped alone,
That made him pipe so merrily, as never none.

"She was, to weet, that jolly shepherd's lass
Which piped there unto that merry rout;
That jolly shepherd that there piped was
Poor Colin Clout (who knows not Colin Clout?);
He piped apace while they him danced about;
Pipe, jolly shepherd, pipe thou now apace,
Unto thy love that made thee low to lout;
Thy love is present there with thee in place,
Thy love is there advanced to be another Grace."

Is there any passage in any poet that so ripples and sparkles with simple delight as this? It is a sky of Italian April, full of sunshine and the hidden ecstasy of larks. And we like it all the more that it reminds us of that passage in his friend Sidney's Arcadia, where the shepherd-boy pipes "as if he would never be old." If we compare it with the mystical scene in Dante,t of which it is a reminiscence, it will seem almost like a bit of real life; but taken by itself, it floats as unconcerned in our cares and sorrows and vulgarities as a sunset cloud. The sound of that pastoral pipe seems to come from as far away as Thessaly, when Apollo was keeping sheep there. Sorrow, the great idealiser, had had the portrait of Beatrice on her easel for years, and every touch of her pencil transfigured the woman more and more into the glorified saint. But Elizabeth Nagle was a solid thing of flesh and blood, who would sit down at meat with the poet on the very day when he had thus beatified her. As Dante was drawn upward from heaven to heaven by the eyes of Beatrice, so was Spenser lifted away from the actual by those of that ideal Beauty whereof his mind had conceived the lineaments in its solitary musings over Plato, but of whose haunting presence the delicacy of his senses had already premonished him. The intrusion of the real world upon this supersensual mood of his wrought an instant disenchantment :

"Much wondered Calidore at this strange sight

Whose like before his eye had never seen,

# 66 "Faery Queen," B. VI., c. x., 10-16. ↑ Purgatorio, XXIX., XXX.

And, standing long astonished in sprite
And rapt with pleasance, wist not what to ween,
Whether it were the train of Beauty's Queen,
Or Nymphs, or Fairies, or enchanted show
With which his eyes might have deluded been,
Therefore resolving what it was to know,
Out of the woods he rose and toward them did go.

"But soon as he appeared to their view

They vanished all away out of his sight

And clean were gone, which way he never knew,
All save the shepherd, who, for fell despite
Of that displeasure, broke his bagpipe quite."

Ben Jonson said that "he had consumed a whole night looking to his great toe, about which he had seen Tartars and Turks, Romans and Carthaginians, fight in his imagination;" and Coleridge has told us how his " eyes made pictures when they were shut." This is not uncommon, but I fancy that Spenser was more habitually possessed by his imagination than is usual even with poets. His visions must have accompanied him "in glory and in joy" along the common thoroughfares of life, and seemed to him, it may be suspected, more real than the men and women he met there. His "most fine spirit of sense" would have tended to keep him in this exalted mood. I must give an example of the sensuousness of which I have spoken :—

"And in the midst of all a fountain stood

Of richest substance that on earth might be,
So pure and shiny that the crystal flood
Through every channel running one might see;
Most goodly it with curious imagery

Was overwrought, and shapes of naked boys,
Of which some seemed with lively jollity
To fly about, playing their wanton toys,

Whilst others did themselves embay in liquid joys.

"And over all, of purest gold was spread

A trail of ivy in his native hue;

For the rich metal was so coloured

That he who did not well avised it view