y Queen_ glows and
is ablaze with beauty; and that beauty is so rich, so real, and so
uncommon, that for its sake the severest readers of Spenser have
pardoned much that is discordant with it, much that in the reading has
wasted their time and disappointed them.

There is one portion of the beauty of the _Faery Queen_, which in its
perfection and fulness had never yet been reached in English poetry.
This was the music and melody of his verse. It was this wonderful,
almost unfailing sweetness of numbers which probably as much as anything
set the _Faery Queen_ at once above all contemporary poetry. The English
language is really a musical one, and say what people will, the English
ear is very susceptible to the infinite delicacy and suggestiveness of
musical rhythm and cadence. Spenser found the secret of it. The art has
had many and consummate masters since, as different in their melody as
in their thoughts from Spenser. And others at the time, Shakespere
pre-eminently, heard, only a little later, the same grandeur, and the
same subtle beauty in the sounds of their mother-tongue, only waiting
the artist's skill to be combined and harmonized into strains of
mysterious fascination. But Spenser was the first to show that he had
acquired a command over what had hitherto been heard only in exquisite
fragments, passing too soon into roughness and confusion. It would be
too much to say that his cunning never fails, that his ear is never dull
or off its guard. But when the length and magnitude of the composition
are considered, with the restraints imposed by the new nine-line stanza,
however convenient it may have been, the vigour, the invention, the
volume and rush of language, and the keenness and truth of ear amid its
diversified tasks are indeed admirable, which could keep up so prolonged
and so majestic a stream of original and varied poetical melody. If his
stanzas are monotonous, it is with the grand monotony of the seashore,
where billow follows billow, each swelling diversely, and broken into
different curves and waves upon its mounting surface, till at last it
falls over, and spreads and rushes up in a last long line of foam upon
the beach.

3. But all this is but the outside shell and the fancy framework in
which the substance of the poem is enclosed. Its substance is the poet's
philosophy of life. It shadows forth, in type and parable, his ideal of
the perfection of the human character, with its special features, it