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context, which often count highest in the estimation of poetry. His
vocabulary and general style, if not more remote from the vernacular, have
sometimes a touch of deliberate estrangement from that vernacular which is
no doubt of itself a fault. His conception of a great work is looser, more
excursive, less dramatic. As compared with Shelley he lacks not merely the
modern touches which appeal to a particular age, but the lyrical ability in
which Shelley has no equal among English poets. But in each case he redeems
these defects with, as it seems to me, far more than counterbalancing
merits. He is never prosaic as Milton, like his great successor Wordsworth,
constantly is, and his very faults are the faults of a poet. He never (as
Shelley does constantly) dissolves away into a flux of words which simply
bids good-bye to sense or meaning, and wanders on at large, unguided,
without an end, without an aim. But he has more than these merely negative
merits. I have seen long accounts of Spenser in which the fact of his
invention of the Spenserian stanza is passed over almost without a word of
comment. Yet in the formal history of poetry (and the history of poetry
must always be pre-eminently a history of form) there is simply no
achievement so astonishing as this. That we do not know the inventors of
the great single poetic vehicles, the hexameter, the iambic Senarius, the
English heroic, the French Alexandrine, is one thing. It is another that in
Spenser's case alone can the invention of a complicated but essentially
integral form be assigned to a given poet. It is impossible to say that
Sappho invented the Sapphic, or Alcaeus the Alcaic: each poet may have been
a Vespucci to some precedent Columbus. But we are in a position to say that
Spenser did most unquestionably invent the English Spenserian stanza--a
form only inferior in individual beauty to the sonnet, which is itself
practically _adespoton_, and far superior to the sonnet in its capacity of
being used in multiples as well as singly. When the unlikelihood of such a
complicated measure succeeding in narrative form, the splendid success of
it in The _Faerie Queene_, and the remarkable effects which have
subsequently been got out of it by men so different as Thomson, Shelley,
and Lord Tennyson, are considered, Spenser's invention must, I think, be
counted the most considerable of its kind in literature.

But it may be very freely admitted that this technical merit, gre