suous. The
personages in the _Faery Queene_ are not characters, but richly colored
figures, moving to the accompaniment of delicious music, in an
atmosphere of serene remoteness from the earth. Charles Lamb said that
he was the poet's poet, that is, he appealed wholly to the artistic
sense and to the love of beauty. Not until Keats did another English
poet appear so filled with the passion for all outward shapes of
beauty, so exquisitely alive to all impressions of the senses. Spenser
was, in some respects, more an Italian than an English poet. It is
said that the Venetian gondoliers still sing the stanzas of Tasso's
_Gerusalemme Liberata_. It is not easy to imagine the Thames bargees
chanting passages from the _Faery Queene_. Those English poets who
have taken strongest hold upon their public have done so by their
profound interpretation of our common life. But Spenser escaped
altogether from reality into a region of pure imagination. His aerial
creations resemble the blossoms of the epiphytic orchids, which have no
root in the soil, but draw their nourishment from the moisture of the
air.

"_Their_ birth was of the womb of morning dew,
And _their_ conception of the glorious prime."

Among the minor poems of Spenser the most delightful were his
_Prothalamion_ and _Epithalamion_. The first was a "spousal verse,"
made for the double wedding of the Ladies Catherine and {74} Elizabeth
Somerset, whom the poet figures as two white swans that come swimming
down the Thames, whose surface the nymphs strew with lilies, till it
appears "like a bride's chamber-floor."

"Sweet Thames, run softly till I end my song,"

is the burden of each stanza. The _Epithalamion_ was Spenser's own
marriage song, written to crown his series of _Amoretti_, or love
sonnets, and is the most splendid hymn of triumphant love in the
language. Hardly less beautiful than these was _Muiopotmos; or, the
Fate of the Butterfly_, an addition to the classical myth of Arachne,
the spider. The four hymns in praise of _Love_ and _Beauty_, _Heavenly
Love_ and _Heavenly Beauty_, are also stately and noble poems, but by
reason of their abstractness and the Platonic mysticism which they
express, are less generally pleasing than the others mentioned.
Allegory and mysticism had no natural affiliation with Spenser's
genius. He was a seer of visions, of _images_ full, brilliant, and
distinct, and not like Bunyan, Dante, or Hawthorne, a projector