And Phoebus, fresh as bridegroom to his mate,

Came dancing forth, shaking his dewy hair

And hurls his glistening beams through dewy air."
The generous indefiniteness, which treats an hour
more or less as of no account, is in keeping
with that sense of endless leisures which it is
one chief merit of the poem to suggest. But
Spenser's dilatation extends to thoughts as well
as to phrases and images. He does not love the
concise. Yet his dilatation is not mere disten-
sion, but the expansion of natural growth in the
rich soil of his own mind, wherein the merest
stick of a verse puts forth leaves and blossoms.
Here is one of his, suggested by Homer: '—

66

Upon the top of all his lofty crest

A bunch of hairs discolored diversly,

With sprinkled pearl and gold full richly drest,
Did shake, and seemed to dance for jollity;

Like to an almond-tree ymounted high

On top of green Selinus all alone

With blossoms brave bedecked daintily,

Whose tender locks do tremble every one

At every little breath that under heaven is blown.'

And this is the way he reproduces five preg-
nant verses of Dante :

1 Iliad, xvII. 55 seqq. Referred to in Upton's note on Faery
Queen, bk. 1. c. vii. 32. Into what a breezy couplet trailing off
with an alexandrine has Homer's πνοιαὶ παντοίων ἀνέμων ex-
panded! Chapman unfortunately has slurred this passage in his
version, and Pope tittivated it more than usual in his. I have
no other translation at hand. Marlowe was so taken by this
passage in Spenser that he put it bodily into his Tamburlaine.

"Seggendo in piuma

In fama non si vien, nè sotto coltre,
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 labors and his mind
Behaves with cares, cannot so easy miss.
Abroad in arms, at home in studious kind,

Who seeks with painful toil shall Honor 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.” 2

"For sitting upon down,

Or under quilt, one cometh not to fame,
Withouten which whoso his life consumes

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.

2 Faery Queen, bk. 11. c. iii. 40, 41.

Spenser's mind always demands this large elbowroom. 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, —

"The noble heart that harbors virtuous thought

And is with child of glorious-great intent

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

I

One's very soul seems to dilate with that last verse. And here 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 men 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 succor us that succor 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 their bright squadrons round about us plant;
And all for love and nothing for reward;

O, why should heavenly God to men have such regard ?
Faery Queen, I. c. v. I.

2 Ibid. II. c. viii. I, 2.

2

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. But
he has characterized 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 discolored snake whose hidden snares

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

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 wallëd town,
Might there be heard: but careless quiet lies
Wrapt in eternal silence far from enemies." 2

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; yet it is full of form, color, and all earthly luxury, and so far, if not real, yet apprehensible Faery Queen, III. c. xi. 28. 2 Ibid. I. c. i. 41.