And _their_ conception of the glorious prime.

Among the minor poems of Spenser the most delightful were his
_Prothalamion_ and _Epithalamion_. The first was a "spousal verse," made
for the double wedding of the Ladies Catherine and Elizabeth Somerset,
whom the poet figures as two white swans that come swimming down the
Thames, the surface of which the nymphs strew with lilies, till it
appears "like a bride's chamber-floor."

Sweet Thames, run softly till I end my song,

is the burden of each stanza. The _Epithalamion_ was Spenser's own
marriage song, written to crown his series of _Amoretti_ or love
sonnets, and is the most splendid hymn of triumphant love in the
language. Hardly less beautiful than these was _Muiopotmos; or, the Fate
of the Butterfly_, an addition to the classical myth of Arachne, the
spider. The four hymns in praise of _Love_ and _Beauty_, _Heavenly Love_
and _Heavenly Beauty_, are also stately and noble poems, but by reason
of their abstractness and the Platonic mysticism which they express, are
less generally pleasing than the others mentioned. Allegory and
mysticism had no natural affiliation with Spenser's genius. He was a
seer of visions, of _images_ full, brilliant, and distinct; and not,
like Bunyan, Dante, or Hawthorne, a projector into bodily shapes of
_ideas_, typical and emblematic; the shadows which haunt the conscience
and the mind.

* * * * *

1. English Writers. Henry Morley. Cassell & Co., 1887.
4 vols.

2. Skeat's Specimens of English Literature, 1394-1579
(Clarendon Press Series.) Oxford.

3. Morte Darthur. London: Macmillan & Co., 1868.
(Globe Edition.)

4. English and Scottish Ballads. Edited by Francis J.
Child. Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1859. 8 vols.

5. Spenser's Poetical Works. Edited by Richard Morris.
London: Macmillan & Co., 1877. (Globe Edition.)

6. "A Royal Poet." In Washington Irving's Sketch
Book. New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1864.

CHAPTER III.

THE AGE OF SHAKSPERE.

1564-1616.

The great age of English poetry opened with the publication of Spenser's
_Shepheard's Calendar_, in 1579, and closed with the printing of
Milton's _Samson Agonistes_, in 1671. Within this period of little less
than a century English thought passed through many changes, and there
were several successive phases of style in our imaginative literature.
Milton, who acknowledged Spenser as his master, and who was a boy of
eight years