tent to write out of those parts of himself which
are too delicate and fiery for any deadening exercise. Every generation
has more and more loosened the rhythm, more and more broken up and
disorganised, for the sake of subtlety of detail, those great rhythms
which move, as it were, in masses of sound. Poetry has become more
spiritual, for the soul is of all things the most delicately organised,
but it has lost in weight and measure and in its power of telling long
stories and of dealing with great and complicated events. _Laon and
Cythna_, though I think it rises sometimes into loftier air than the
_Faerie Queene_; and _Endymion_, though its shepherds and wandering
divinities have a stranger and more intense beauty than Spenser's, have
need of too watchful and minute attention for such lengthy poems. In
William Morris, indeed, one finds a music smooth and unexacting like
that of the old story-tellers, but not their energetic pleasure, their
rhythmical wills. One too often misses in his _Earthly Paradise_ the
minute ecstasy of modern song without finding that old happy-go-lucky
tune that had kept the story marching.

Spenser's contemporaries, writing lyrics or plays full of lyrical
moments, write a verse more delicately organised than his and crowd more
meaning into a phrase than he, but they could not have kept one's
attention through so long a poem. A friend who has a fine ear told me
the other day that she had read all Spenser with delight and yet could
remember only four lines. When she repeated them they were from the poem
by Matthew Roydon, which is bound up with Spenser because it is a
commendation of Sir Philip Sidney:

'A sweet, attractive kind of grace,
A full assurance given by looks,
Continual comfort in a face,
The lineaments of Gospel books.'

Yet if one were to put even these lines beside a fine modern song one
would notice that they had a stronger and rougher energy, a
featherweight more, if eye and ear were fine enough to notice it, of the
active will, of the happiness that comes out of life itself.

IX

I have put into this book[5] only those passages from Spenser that I
want to remember and carry about with me. I have not tried to select
what people call characteristic passages, for that is, I think, the way
to make a dull book. One never really knows anybody's taste but one's
own, and if one likes anything sincerely one may be certain that there
are other people made out of the same e