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Is it not a miserable destiny to be obliged to read stanza after stanza redolent of such rich perfumed words about the lady, and then to find that Una is not a mortal or a spirit evenbut Truth! An abstraction! A whim of degrading reason! A figment of a moralist's heated and disordered brain. Any Lie of a poet is better than any Truth of a moralist. Why did Spenser stoop to run on the same intellectual plain as the accidental teacher? The teacher would have done admirably for Truth, but all the worthy essayists of England in the "spacious days of Queen Elizabeth," put together, could not have written the stanzas about Una as Spenser saw her. This poaching of poets on the preserves of moralists is one of the most shameful things in the history of art.

There are few poets it is harder to select quotations from than Spenser. The fact is, all the Faerie Queen ought to be quoted except the blinding allegory. I find that in years of my movement from the opening of the poem to page 472, the limit I have reached, I have marked a hundred passages at least, some

of them running through pages. In no other poem-except Shelley's Alastor-do I notice such grievous, continuous pencil scores. What is one to do? Whither is one to turn? As I handle the book I am lost in a deeper forest of delight than ever knight of Gloriana's trod. Here I find a passage of several stanzas marked. I am much too lazy to copy them, and the spelling is troublesome often. But who can resist this?—

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Sweete wordes, like dropping honny, she did shed,
And twixt the perles and rubins softly brake
A silver sound, that heavenly musicke seemed to make.

Upon her eyelids many graces sate

Under the shadow of her even browes."

I have quoted the three lines and a half of the earlier stanza merely that they may act as an overture to the last two lines. Surely there are no two lovelier lines in the language! In the last line the words seem to melt together of their own propinquity.

Here is an alexandrine that haunts me night and day

"Sweete is the love that comes alone with willingnesse."

As a rule, I hate writing with the books I am speaking of near me; they fetter one cruelly when they are at hand. There is a tendency to verify one's memory, and read up the context of favourite lines. This is checking to the speed and chilling to the spirits. When I was saying something about the Spelling-Book and the Pilgrim's Progress, I had the copies within arm's length, for I did not know either well enough to trust to memory. Since I got done with them I have placed them in distant safety. But one likes to handle Spenser to have it nigh. My copy is lying at my left elbow in the blazing sun as I write now. It seems to me I shall never again look into the Spelling-Book or the Pilgrim's Progress. Fables and allegories are only foolishnesses fit for people of weak intellect and children. Well, when I put down this pen, and before this ink is dry, I shall have resumed my interrupted reading of the Faerie Queen at page 473. My intellect is too weak and my heart too childish to resist the seduction of Spenser's verse. So much for my own theory of allegory and my respect for my own theory.

MY COPY OF KEATS.

THE only copy of Keats I ever owned is a modest volume published by Edward Moxon and Co. in the year 1861. By writing on its yellow fly-leaf I find it was given to me four years later, in September 1865. At that time it was clean and bright, opened with strict impartiality when set upon its back, and had not learned to respond with alacrity to hasty searches for favourite passages.

The binding is now racked and feeble from use; and if, as in army regulations, service under warm suns is to be taken for longer service in cooler climes, it may be said that to the exhaustion following overwork have been added the prejudices of premature age.

It is not bound as books were bound once upon a time, when they outlasted the tables and chairs,

even the walls; ay, the very races and names of their owners. The cover is simple plain blue cloth; on the back is a little patch of printing in gold, with the words Keats's Poetical Works in the centre of a twined gilt ribbon and twisted gilt flowers. The welt at the back is bleached and frayed; the corners of the cover are battered and turned in. There is a chink between the cover and the arched back; and the once proud Norman line of that arc is flattened and degraded, retaining no more of its pristine look of sturdy strength than a wheaten straw after the threshing.

In a list of new books preceding the biography of the poet I find the volume I speak of under the head "POETRY-Pocket Editions;" described as "Keats's Poetical Works. With a Memoir by R. M. Milnes. Price 3s. 6d. cloth." It was from no desire to look my gift-horse in the mouth I alighted upon the penultimate fact disclosed in the description. When I become owner of any volume my first delight in it is to read the catalogue of new books annexed, if there be any, before breaking my fast upon the

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