Knit with a golden baldric which forelay
Athwart her snowy breast, and did divide
Her dainty paps; which, like young fruit in May,
Now little gan to swell, and, being tied,
Through her thin weed their places only signified.

Her yellow locks, crisped like golden wire,
About her shoulders weren loosely shed,
And, when the wind among them did inspire,
They waved like a pennon wide dispread
And low behind her back were scattered:
And, whether art it were or heedless hap,

As through the flowering forest rash she fled,

In her rude hairs sweet flowers themselves did lap,
And flourishing fresh leaves and blossoms did enwrap.

Such as Diana by the sandy shore

Of swift Eurotas, or on Cynthus green,

Where all the nymphs have her unwares forlore,
Wandereth alone with bow and arrows keen,

To seek her game; or as that famous queen
Of Amazons whom Pyrrhus did destroy,
The day that first of Priam she was seen,
Did show herself in great triumphant joy,

To succour the weak state of sad afflicted Troy." 1

Whoever be right, Spenser is not wrong. One may properly hesitate to test the poet, as Caylus suggested, by the number of subjects he provides for the artist in colour-other and severer tests may be applied-but, if any argument prove persuasive, it will be The Faerie Queene itself. It is, as has often been said, a long gallery of pictures, easily to be transferred to canvas. Leigh Hunt amused his fancy by a selection from this " poet of the painters," naming the artist for each subject. Raphael for "The Marriage Procession of the Thames and Medway"; Correggio for "Cupid usurping the throne of Juppiter "; Michael Angelo for "Sir Guyon binding Furor "; Titian for "Venus, in search of Cupid, meeting Diana"; Guido for "Aurora and Tithonus"; Salvator Rosa for "The Cave of Despair"; Albano for "The Nymphs and Graces dancing to a shepherd's pipe"; Rembrandt for "A Knight in armour looking into a Cave."

A good reader will value Spenser for more than one quality, for his "visible poetry," his pageantry of colour, his copia verborum, his moonlight atmosphere. But his Circean charm is perhaps most fully felt in the half unconscious mood of the 1 The Faerie Queene, Bk. II. Canto 3.

listener to music, awake to harmonies of sound but careless of more than these. Men of active mind, insensitive to verbal melody, are never numbered among his adherents. They grow impatient for the progress of the idea while the poet is busy with its embellishment, they ask for advance in meaning while he dreamily repeats himself, adding honey-sweet word to word. One has a suspicion that had Spenser presented himself for admission to Plato's Republic his high and clear intentions might not have sufficed to secure an entrance, although this fairyland typifies the country of the spirit and the pursuit of glory the pursuit of righteousness. A certain discrepancy, a certain contradiction between the creed and the manner of stating it might have alarmed the rulers. Yet if, as Plato argued, "absence of grace and inharmonious movement and discord are nearly allied to ill words and ill nature, as grace and harmony are the sisters of goodness and virtue and bear their likeness, it is demonstrable that The Faerie Queene was written by a saint, who was also

High priest of all the Muses' mysteries."

With Spenser it is not so much the word that tells, as with Milton- "The helmed Cherubim And sworded Seraphim," the crystal battlements," "the throne of Chaos," "the marble air," "Twilight's sober livery," "the angelic guards," "the Attic bird," "the golden Chersonese -nor so much the phrase, as with Shakespeare, "I am dying, Egypt, dying," "Behold divineness, No elder than a boy," "For her own person, It beggar'd all description," "The queen of curds and cream,' "" He has no children nor so much the line, as with Chaucer

"His studie was but litel on the Bible."

"The wrasteling of this world asketh a fall."
"O paleys empty and disconsolat!"

"His seven wyves walking by his syde."

With Spenser it is the stanza or the page; time and space are necessary to him for the development of his world of beauty—

"The walls were round about appareled

With costly cloths of Arras and of Tour;
In which with cunning hand was pourtrayed
The love of Venus and her paramour,

The fair Adonis, turned to a flower;

A work of rare device and wondrous wit.
First did it show the bitter baleful stowre,
Which her essayed with many a fervent fit,

When first her tender heart was with his beauty smit.

Then with what sleights and sweet allurements she
Enticed the boy, as well that art she knew,

And wooed him her paramour to be;

Now making girlands of each flower that grew,
To crown his golden locks with honour due;

Now leading him into a secret shade

From his beauperes, and from bright heaven's view,
Where him to sleep she gently would persuade,
Or bathe him in a fountain by some covert glade:

And, whilst he slept, she over him would spread
Her mantle coloured like the starry skies,
And her soft arm lay underneath his head,
And with ambrosial kisses bathe his eyes;

And, whilst he bathed, with her two crafty spies
She secretly would search each dainty limb,

And throw into the well sweet rosemaries,

And fragrant violets, and pansies trim;

And ever with sweet nectar she did sprinkle him." 1

"The general end" of The Faerie Queene was, declared the author, "to fashion a gentleman or noble person in virtuous and gentle discipline." Such noble persons distinguished the circle of his intimate friends. Raleigh, "the shepherd of the ocean," the first reader of the poem, like himself for some years an unwilling exile in Ireland, and Sidney, in whom survived all the graces of chivalry, in whom died the last of the knights, were men not unworthy of the age to which Spenser looked back with wistful and idealising gaze. Elizabeth's world in a poet's enhancing eyes could hardly have appeared a less spacious field for heroic endeavour than any in the recorded past, while than Ireland, where, in the dark Kilcolman tower, begirt with gloomy woods and surrounded by savage and despoiled outlaws eager for vengeance on the usurpers, The Faerie Queene was written, no more fitting ground for armed and romantic adventure could well have been imagined. "To read," wrote Dean Church, of Raleigh's adventures with the Irish chieftains, his challenges and single combats, his escapes at fords and woods, is like reading bits of The Faerie Queene in prose. As Spenser chose to write of knight-errantry, his picture of it has doubtless gained 1 The Faerie Queene, Bk. III. Canto 1.

in truth and strength by his very practical experience of what such life as he describes must be. The Faerie Queene might almost be called the Epic of the English Wars in Ireland under Elizabeth, as much as the Epic of English virtue and valour at the same period."

Spenser's age was heroic, heroes his friends. Around his home in the wild Desmond country many a feat of arms was done. He was a man-we read in a dispatch of the Council in 1598—“ not unskilful or without experience in the wars." In that same year he was himself a fugitive, when his castle of Kilcolman was sacked and burnt, and in his own person experienced the disastrous chances, the moving accidents which as a poet he had imagined and described. Yet in The Faerie Queene one hardly feels the pressure of events, the overflowing energy of the time. Fever and turmoil are banished from it, the voices of human passion stilled, the noises of the tempestuous world, like that of a receding tide, "heard, but scarcely heard to flow." In The Castle of Indolence, by his disciple Thomson, there seems more than a suggestion of The Faerie Queene itself—

A pleasing land of drowsy head it was

Of dreams that wave before the half-shut eye;
And of gay castles in the clouds that pass,
For ever flushing round a summer sky:
There eke the soft delights, that witchingly
Instil a wanton sweetness through the breast;
And the calm pleasures always hovered nigh;
But whate'er smacked of noyance or unrest

Was far, far off expelled from this delicious nest."

No one as he reads The Faerie Queene thinks of England at war, of anxious statesmen, like Burleigh and Walsingham, or adventurous seamen on the Spanish main, of the great explorers, of Drake and the Invincible Armada. Nor is it probable that while he wrote Spenser had the stirring events of contemporary history in mind. It is far more probable that as he gazed into his magic glass, and watched the visions rise, they became the reality, and the anxious present receded into the world of shadows gladly forgotten. It is far more probable that in his poetry he sought and found forgetfulness, that it had for him the virtues of an anodyne, than that he attempts to embody there his own

experience of life. The Faerie Queene is the fruit of solitude and long stretches of solitude. Dreams like these do not visit the city dweller in the intervals of the street cries, the soldier in camp, nor the adventurous voyager on the seas. The architect of these airy palaces, "pinnacled dim in the intense inane,” had not the dramatist's need" to work upon stuff," as Byron phrased it, to feel the throb of existence, to mix with the politicians and soldiers, the lawyers and the burgesses. He needed rather a screen between him and the loud-roaring world—

"And more to lull him in his slumber soft,

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

Mix'd with a murmuring wind, much like the sound
Of swarming bees, did cast him in a swound.
No other noise, nor people's troublous cries,
That still are wont t'annoy the walled town,
Might there be heard; but careless quiet lies
Wrapt in eternal silence, far from enemies." 1

For all that his lot was cast in the fiercer currents of history, Spenser was at heart a reader, a bookman. The invisible is with him the veritable, of which the shows of time are a momentary reflection. And though the defined and stated allegory may without loss, indeed with positive poetic gain, be laid aside, there remains and is diffused throughout his poem a sense that all its scenes, even the combats and pursuits, the sudden encounters of knight with knight, the gardens and palaces, the sculptured groups of graces, nymphs, and fauns-have a significance beyond themselves, beyond their beauty and their art, that in these regions from first to last all is of the spirit. The mirror of Spenser's mind gave back not the image of the exterior world that lay around him but of all that he had read and pondered in romance and poetic history. In The Faerie Queene, it may be alleged, we are at a second remove from reality, already transfigured in the books the author knew and followed. Battles have lost their horror and war its ugly side, wounds bring no pain, hate and fear are deprived of their poison, the sting of life is extracted, and the rose itself is without its thorn. Yet not without reason, for it is the idea he pursues.

1 The Faerie Queene, Bk. I, Canto 1.