nobleness, gentle and tender as the spirit of its own chivalry, modulates every cadence. Spenser's extraordinary faculty of vision-seeing and picturedrawing can fail to strike none of his readers; but he will not be adequately appreciated or enjoyed by those who regard verse either as a non-essential or as a very subordinate element of poetry. Such minds, however, must miss half the charm of all poetry. Not only all that is purely sensuous in poetry must escape them, but likewise all the pleasurable excitement that lies in the harmonious accordance of the musical expression with the informing idea or feeling, and in the additional force or brilliancy that in such inter-union is communicated by the one to the other. All beauty is dependent upon form: other things may often enter into the beautiful, but this is the one thing that can never be dispensed with; all other ingredients, as they must be contained by, so must be controlled by this; and the only thing that standing alone may constitute the beautiful is form or outline. Accordingly, whatever addresses itself to or is suited to gratify the imagination takes this character: it falls into more or less of regularity and measure. Mere passion is of all things the most unmeasured and irregular, naturally the most opposed of all things to form. But in that state it is also wholly unfitted for the purposes of art; before it can become imaginative in any artistic sense it must have put off its original merely volcanic character, and worn itself into something of measure and music. Thus all impassioned composition is essentially melodious, in a higher or lower degree; measured language is the appropriate and natural expression of passion or deep feeling operating artistically in writing or speech. The highest and most perfect kind of measured language is verse; and passion expressing itself in verse is what is properly called poetry. Take away the verse, and in most cases you take away half the poetry, sometimes much more. The verse, in truth, is only one of several things by the aid of which the passion seeks to give itself effective expression, or by which the thought is endowed with additional animation or beauty; nay, it is only one ingredient of the musical expression of the thought or passion. If the verse may be dispensed with, so likewise upon the same principle may every decoration of the sentiment or statement, everything else that would do more than convey the bare fact. Let the experiment be tried, and see how it will answer. Take a single instance. "Immediately through the obscurity a great number of flags were seen to be raised, all richly coloured:" out of these words, no doubt, the reader or hearer might, after some meditation, 1 extract the conception of a very imposing scene. But, although they intimate with sufficient exactness and distinctness the same literal fact, they are nevertheless the deadest prose compared with Milton's glorious words : "All in a moment through the gloom were seen Ten thousand banners rise into the air, And so it would happen in every other case in which true poetry was divested of its musical expression: a part, and it might be the greater part, of its life, beauty, and effect, would always be lost; and it would, in truth, cease to be what is distinctively called poetry or song, of which verse is as much one of the necessary constituents as passion or imagination itself. Those who dispute this will never be able to prove more than that their own enjoyment of the sensuous part of poetry, which is really that in which its peculiar character resides, is limited or feeble; which it may very well be in minds otherwise highly gifted, and even endowed with considerable imaginative power. The feeling of the merely beautiful, however, or of beauty unimpregnated by something of a moral spirit or meaning, is not likely in such minds to be very deep or strong. High art, therefore, is not their proper region, in any of its departments. In poetry they will probably not very greatly admire or enjoy either Spenser or Milton-and perhaps would prefer Paradise Lost in the prose version which Osborne the bookseller in the last century got a gentleman of Oxford to execute for the use of readers to whom the sense was rather obscured by the verse. Passing over several of the great passages towards the commencement of the poem-such as the description of Queen Lucifera and her Six Counsellors in the Fourth Canto of the First Book, that of the visit of the Witch Duessa to Hell in the Fifth, and that of the Cave of Despair in the Ninth-which are probably more familiarly known to the generality of readers, we will take as a specimen of the Fairy Queen the escape of the Enchanter Archimage from Bragadoccio and his man Trompart, and the introduction and description of Belphoebe, in the Third Canto of Book Second: He stayed not for more bidding, but away Was sudden vanished out of his sight: The northern wind his wings did broad display At his command, and reared him up light, From off the earth to take bis airy flight. They looked about, but nowhere could espy Till that they come unto a forest green, In which they shrowd themselves from causeless fear; And made the forest ring, as it would rive in twain. Of what might hap. Eftsoon there stepped foorth That seemed to be a woman of great worth, Her face so fair as flesh it seemed not, But heavenly pourtrait of bright angels' hue, The which ambrosial odours from them threw, In her fair eyes two living lamps did flame, To kindle oft assayed, but had no might; For with dread majesty and awful ire She broke his wanton darts, and quenched base desire, Her ivory forehead, full of bounty brave, Like a broad table did itself dispread ¿Bugbear. 2 Conceal. 3 Soon. 4 Carriage. All good and honour might therein be read, A silver sound, that heavenly music seemed to make. Upon her eyelids many graces sate, 1 Rubies. And sovereign moniment of mortal vows, How shall frail pen descrive her heavenly face, For fear through want of skill her beauty to disgrace? So fair, and thousand thousand times more fair, She seemed, when she presented was to sight; All in a silken camus lilly white, Below her ham her weed did somewhat train; All barred with golden bends, which were entailed's In a rich jewel, and therein entrailed 16 The ends of all the knots, that none might see Like two fair marble pillars they were seen, Those same with stately grace and princely port She could them nimbly move, and after fly apace. 5 Thin gown. 9 Hang. Beautiful looks. 6 Gathered. 10 Enclosed. 13 Engraved, marked. 16 Interwoven. And in her hand a sharp boar-spear she held, Stuffed with steel-headed darts, wherewith she quelled Her dainty paps; which, like young fruit in May, Her yellow locks, crisped like golden wire, As through the flowering forest rash she fled, In her rude hairs sweet flowers themselves did lap, Such as Diana, by the sandy shore Of swift Eurotas, or on Cynthus green, Where all the nymphs have her unwares forlore, OTHER ELIZABETHAN POETRY. In the six or seven years from 1590 to 1596, what a world of wealth had thus been added to our poetry by Spenser alone! what a different thing from what it was before had the English language been made by his writings to natives, to foreigners, to all posterity! But England was now a land of song, and the busiest and most productive age of our poetical literature had fairly commenced. What are commonly called the minor poets of the Elizabethan age are to be counted by hundreds, and few of them are altogether without merit. If they have nothing else, the least gifted of them have at least something of the freshness and airiness of that balmy morn, some tones caught from their greater contemporaries, some echoes of the spirit of music that then filled the universal air. For the most part the minor 1 Forsaken. |