n to modern poetry its deep
colour for colour's sake, its overflowing pattern, its background of
decorative landscape, and its insubordination of detail. At the opening
of a movement we are busy with first principles, and can find out
everything but the road we are to go, everything but the weight and
measure of the impulse, that has come to us out of life itself, for that
is always in defiance of reason, always without a justification but by
faith and works. Harvey set Spenser to the making of verses in classical
metre, and certain lines have come down to us written in what Spenser
called 'Iambicum trimetrum.' His biographers agree that they are very
bad, but, though I cannot scan them, I find in them the charm of what
seems a sincere personal emotion. The man himself, liberated from the
minute felicities of phrase and sound, that are the temptation and the
delight of rhyme, speaks of his Mistress some thought that came to him
not for the sake of poetry, but for love's sake, and the emotion instead
of dissolving into detached colours, into 'the spangly gloom' that Keats
saw 'froth and boil' when he put his eyes into 'the pillowy cleft,'
speaks to her in poignant words as if out of a tear-stained love-letter:

'Unhappie verse, the witnesse of my unhappie state,
Make thy selfe fluttring winge for thy fast flying
Thought, and fly forth to my love wheresoever she be.
Whether lying restlesse in heavy bedde, or else
Sitting so cheerlesse at the cheerful boorde, or else
Playing alone carelesse on her heavenlie virginals.
If in bed, tell hir that my eyes can take no rest;
If at boorde tell her that my mouth can eat no meate
If at her virginals, tell her that I can heare no mirth.'

II

He left College in his twenty-fourth year, and stayed for a while in
Lancashire, where he had relations, and there fell in love with one he
has written of in _The Shepheards Calender_ as 'Rosalind, the widdowes
daughter of the Glenn,' though she was, for all her shepherding, as one
learns from a College friend, 'a gentlewoman of no mean house.' She
married Menalchus of the _Calender_ and Spenser lamented her for years,
in verses so full of disguise that one cannot say if his lamentations
come out of a broken heart or are but a useful movement in the elaborate
ritual of his poetry, a well-ordered incident in the mythology of his
imagination. To no English poet, perhaps to no European poet before his
day, had the natural ex