Page:Works of Edmund Spenser - 1857.djvu/31

Rh delineator of our evil passions, depicting them in all the force of their hideous reality, and in a manner approaching the sublime.

By those who have misunderstood him, it has been asserted that Spenser’s poetry is all sweetness and destitute of strength. For a refutation of this opinion I need only direct the attention of the reader to the sublime descriptions of “Him who with the night durst ride,” the House of Riches, the Court of Jealousy, the Caves of Mammon and Despair: the latter, especially, is nervously written, and the choice of words, as suited to the object described, admirable; we see before us the very picture of this gloomy den. The poet was perfectly master of his art, and possessed that secret which gives one of its greatest charms to poetry, a choice of expression and epithet extremely apposite to the subject. Virgil has been much praised for a similar quality; but the description of the trees which form the “shadie grove,” Book I., canto i., may bear comparison with any of the finest passages of the Mantuan bard.

Of the sweetness of his verse every one must be sensible; it has the melody of falling waters, and wins upon the senses as imperceptibly. Speaking of this characteristic of our poet’s numbers, Campbell has elegantly said, “He is like a speaker whose tones continue to be pleasing, though he may speak too long; or like a painter, who makes us forget the defect of his design, by the magic of his colouring. We always rise from perusing him with melody in the mind’s ear, and with pictures of romantic beauty impressed on the imagination.” That the Faerie Queene has faults, every one unblinded by prejudice, must be ready to allow; for though teeming with passages of grandeur, beauty, pathos, and sublimity,yet, as a whole, it is wanting in uniformity and compactness. Each of the books might have been published as a separate poem, without injury to the remainder. Indeed, the first, esteemed as by far the best of the six, is a complete work in itself; and, but for the reappearance of Prince Arthur, has little connection with the others. But even this character “appears and vanishes like a spirit, and we lose sight of him too soon to consider him as the hero of the poem.” To account for the unfinished state of the Faerie Queene, it is said that a servant, entrusted with his manuscripts, lost the six remaining books in the precipitate retreat from Ireland at the time of the insurrection. This story is much discountenanced by others, who suppose that it was purposely left incomplete. Whatever be the fact, we are inclined to consider that, for the author’s fame, the poem has not lost in the curtailment, the last three books are much inferior to their predecessors; and we may infer that the subject had already grown too tedious to the author to allow of future improvement.

Spenser has been not unfrequently compared with Shakspeare; we should suppose more for the sake of contrast than from any similarity that exists between them. The one was truly, not of an age, but for all time! the other is uniformly tinctured with the manners of his age. “Shakspeare (as Coleridge has finely written) stands like the yew-tree in Lorton Vale, which has known so many ages that it belongs to none.” With Spenser how different! In his writings we have the same fertility of imagination, the same vivid powers of description, the same nervous grasp of his subject;—but that subject is