eene" to take home with him. "He romped through the scenes of the
romance," reports Mr. Clarke, "like a young horse turned into a spring
meadow." There is something almost uncanny--like the visits of a
spirit--about these recurrent appearances of Spenser in English literary
history. It must be confessed that nowadays we do not greatly romp
through "The Faery Queene." There even runs a story that a certain
professor of literature in an American college, being consulted about
Spenser by one of his scholars, exclaimed impatiently, "Oh, damn
Spenser!" But it is worth while to have him in the literature, if only
as a starter for young poets. Keats' earliest known verses are an
"Imitation of Spenser" in four stanzas. His allusions to him are
frequent, and his fugitive poems include a "Sonnet to Spenser" and a
number of "Spenserian Stanzas." But his only really important experiment
in the measure of "The Faery Queene" was "The Eve of St. Agnes." It was
with fine propriety that Shelley chose that measure for his elegy on
Keats in "Adonais." Keats made a careful study of Spenser's verse, the

"Spenserian vowels that elope with ease"--

and all the rest of it. His own work in this kind is thought to resemble
most closely the "Psyche" of the Irish poetess, Mary Tighe, published in
1805[30] on the well-known fable of Cupid and Psyche in Apuleius. It is
inferred that Keats knew the poem from a mention of the author in one of
his pieces. He also wrote an "Ode to Psyche," which seems, however, to
have been inspired by an engraving in Spenser's "Polymetis." Mrs. Tighe
was one of the latest and best of the professed imitators of Spenser.
There is beauty of a kind in her languidly melodious verse and
over-profuse imagery, but it is not the passionate and quintessential
beauty of Keats. She is quite incapable of such choice and pregnant word
effects as abound in every stanza of "St. Agnes":

"Unclasps her _warmed_ jewels, one by one":

"_Buttressed_ from moonlight":

"The music, _yearning_ like a God in pain":

"The boisterous, _midnight_, festive clarion."

Keats' intimate association with Leigh Hunt, whose acquaintance he made
in 1816, was not without influence on his literary development. He
admired the "Story of Rimini," [31] and he adopted in his early verse
epistles and in "Endymion" (1818), that free ante-Popean treatment of the
couplet with _enjambement_, or overflow, double rimes, etc., which Hunt