produced, cannot be denied without resisting the evidence of ordinary experience.

And, though there is a delicious charm in Spenser's sweetest verse, the finest and rarest elements of his genius were independent of music. That celestial light which occasionally touches his page with an ineffable beauty, and which gave to him in his own time the name of “the heavenly Spenser," is a more wonderful emanation from his mind than its subtlest melodies. We especially feel this in his ideal delineations of woman, in which he has only been exceeded by Shakespeare. He has been called the poet's poet; he should also be called the woman's poet, for the feminine element in his genius is its loftiest, deepest, most angelic element. The tenderness, the ethereal softness and grace, the moral purity, the sentiment untainted by sentimentality, which characterize his impersonations of feminine excellence, show, too, that the poet's brain had been fed from his heart, and that reverence for woman was the instinct of his sensibility before it was confirmed by the insight of his imagination.

The inwardness of Spenser's genius, the constant reference of his creative faculty to internal ideals rather than to objective facts, has given his poem a special character of remoteness. It is often objected to his female characters that they are not sufficiently individ

ualized, and are too far removed from ordinary life to awaken human sympathy. It is to be hoped that the latter part of this charge is not true; for a person who can have no sympathy with Una, and Belphoebe, and Florimel, and Amoret, can have no sympathy with the woman in women. But it must be conceded, that though Shakespeare, like Spenser, draws his women from ideal regions of existence, he has succeeded better in naturalizing them on the planet. The creations of both are characterized by remoteness; but Shakespeare's are direct perceptions of objects ideally remote, and strike us both by their naturalness and their distance from common nature; Spenser really sees the objects as distant, and sees them through a visionary medium. The strong-winged Shakespeare penetrates to the region of spiritual facts which he embodies; Spenser surveys them wonderingly from below. Shakespeare goes up; Spenser looks up; and our poet therefore lacks the great dramatist's "familiar grasp of things divine."

It remains to be said, that though Spenser's outward life was vexed with discontent, and fretted by his resentment of the indifference with which he supposed his claims were treated by the great and powerful, his poetry breathes the very soul of contentment and cheer. This cheer has no connection with mirth, either in the form of wit or humor, but springs from his perception

of an ideal of life, which has become a reality to his heart and imagination. The Faery Queene proves that the perception of the Beautiful can make the heart more abidingly glad than the perception of the ludicrous. In the soul of this seer and singer, who shaped the first vague dreams and unquiet aspirations of the youth into beautiful forms to solace the man, there is a serene depth of tender joy, ay, "a sober certainty of waking bliss"; and, as he has not locked up in his own breast this precious delight, but sent it in vital currents through the marvels and moralities of The Faery Queene to refresh the world, let no defects which criticism can discern hinder the reader from participating in the deep satisfaction of that happy spirit and the visionary glories of that celestialized imagination.

MINOR ELIZABETHAN POETS.

IN the present chapter we propose to speak of a few

of Spenser's contemporaries and successors, who were rated as poets in their own generation, however neglected they may be in ours. We shall select those who have some pretensions to originality of character as well as mind; and, though we shall not mention all who claim the attention of students of literary history, we fear we shall gain the gratitude of the reader for those omitted, rather than for those included, in the survey. Sins of omission are sometimes exalted by circumstances into a high rank among the negative virtues.

Among the minor poets of this era were two imitators of Spenser,- Phineas and Giles Fletcher. They were cousins of Fletcher the dramatist, but with none of his wild blood in their veins, and none of his flashing creativeness in their souls, to give evidence of the relationship. The Purple Island, a poem in twelve cantos, by Phineas, is a long allegorical description of the body and soul of man, perverse in design, melodious in versification, occasionally felicitous in the personification

of abstract qualities, but on the whole to be considered as an exercise of boundless ingenuity to produce insufferable tediousness. Not in the dissecting-room itself is anatomy less poetical than in the harmonious stanzas of The Purple Island. Giles, the brother of Phineas, was the more potent spirit of the two, but his power is often directed by a taste even more elaborately bad. His poem of Christ's Victory and Triumph, in parts almost sublime, in parts almost puerile, is a proof that imaginative fertility may exist in a mind with little imaginative grasp. Campbell, however, considers him a connecting link between Spenser and Milton.

Samuel Daniel, another poet of this period, was the son of a music-master, and was born in 1562. Fuller says of him, that "he carried, in his Christian and surname, two holy prophets, his monitors, so to qualify his raptures that he abhorred all profaneness." Amiable in character, gentle in disposition, and with a genius meditative rather than energetic, he appears to have possessed that combination of qualities which makes men personally pleasing if it does not make them permanently famous. He was patronized both by Elizabeth and James, was the friend of Shakespeare and Camden, and was highly esteemed by the most accomplished women of his time. A most voluminous writer in prose and verse, he was distinguished in both for the purity,