osto's
song is utterly absent from his own. Not a ripple of laughter breaks the
calm surface of Spenser's verse. He is habitually serious, and the
seriousness of his poetic tone reflects the seriousness of his poetic
purpose. His aim, he tells us, was to represent the moral virtues, to
assign to each its knightly patron, so that its excellence might be
expressed and its contrary vice trodden under foot by deeds of arms and
chivalry. In knight after knight of the twelve he purposed to paint, he
wished to embody some single virtue of the virtuous man in its struggle
with the faults and errors which specially beset it; till in Arthur, the
sum of the whole company, man might have been seen perfected, in his
longing and progress towards the "Faerie Queen," the Divine Glory which
is the true end of human effort.

The largeness of his culture indeed, his exquisite sense of beauty, and
above all the very intensity of his moral enthusiasm, saved Spenser from
the narrowness and exaggeration which often distorted goodness into
unloveliness in the Puritan. Christian as he is to the core, his
Christianity is enriched and fertilized by the larger temper of the
Renascence, as well as by a poet's love of the natural world in which
the older mythologies struck their roots. Diana and the gods of
heathendom take a sacred tinge from the purer sanctities of the new
faith; and in one of the greatest songs of the "Faerie Queen" the
conception of love widens, as it widened in the mind of a Greek, into
the mighty thought of the productive energy of Nature. Spenser borrows
in fact the delicate and refined forms of the Platonist philosophy to
express his own moral enthusiasm. Not only does he love, as others have
loved, all that is noble and pure and of good report, but he is fired as
none before or after him have been fired with a passionate sense of
moral beauty. Justice, Temperance, Truth, are no mere names to him, but
real existences to which his whole nature clings with a rapturous
affection. Outer beauty he believed to spring, and loved because it
sprang, from the beauty of the soul within. There was much in such a
moral protest as this to rouse dislike in any age, but it is the glory
of the age of Elizabeth that, "mad world" as in many ways it was, all
that was noble welcomed the "Faerie Queen." Elizabeth herself, says
Spenser, "to mine oaten pipe inclined her ear," and bestowed a pension
on the poet. In 1595 he brought three more books of