Volume 1 / Part 2 — PART II.—Poetry

SECTION I.—Renaissance of Saxon Genius

Transplanted into different races and climates, this paganism receives from each, distinct features and a distinct character. In England it becomes English; the English Renaissance is the Renaissance of the Saxon genius. Invention recommences; and to invent is to express one's genius. A Latin race can only invent by expressing Latin ideas; a Saxon race by expressing Saxon ideas; and we shall find in the new civilization and poetry, descendants of Caedmon and Adhelm, of Piers Plowman, and Robin Hood.

SECTION II.—The Earl of Surrey

Old Puttenham says:

"In the latter end of the same king (Henry the eighth) reigne, sprong up a new company of courtly makers, of whom Sir Thomas Wyat th' elder and Henry Earle of Surrey were the two chieftaines, who having travailed into Italie, and there tasted the sweete and stately measures and stile of the Italian Poesie, as novices newly crept out of the schooles of Dante, Arioste, and Petrarch, they greatly pollished our rude and homely maner of vulgar Poesie, from that it had bene before, and for that cause may justly be sayd the first reformers of our English meetre and stile."[294]

Not that their style was very original, or openly exhibits the new spirit: the Middle Ages is nearly ended, but not quite. By their side Andrew Borde, John Bale, John Heywood, Skelton himself, repeat the platitudes of the old poetry and the coarseness of the old style. Their manners, hardly refined, were still half feudal; on the field, before Landrecies, the English commander wrote a friendly letter to the French governor of Térouanne, to ask him "if he had not some gentlemen disposed to break a lance in honor of the ladies," and promised to send six champions to meet them. Parades, combats, wounds, challenges, love, appeals to the judgment of God, penances—all these are found in the life of Surrey as in a chivalric romance. A great lord, an earl, a relative of the king, who had figured in processions and ceremonies, had made war, commanded fortresses, ravaged countries, mounted to the assault, fallen in the breach, had been saved by his servant, magnificent, sumptuous, irritable, ambitious, four times imprisoned, finally beheaded. At the coronation of Anne Boleyn he wore the fourth sword; at the marriage of Anne of Cleves he was one of the challengers at the jousts. Denounced and placed in durance, he offered to fight in his shirt against an armed adversary. Another time he was put in prison for having eaten flesh in Lent. No wonder if this prolongation of chivalric manners brought with it a prolongation of chivalric poetry; if in an age which had known Petrarch, poets displayed the sentiments of Petrarch. Lord Berners, Sackville, Sir Thomas Wyatt, and Surrey in the first rank, were like Petrarch, plaintive and platonic lovers. It was pure love to which Surrey gave expression; for his lady, the beautiful Geraldine, like Beatrice and Laura, was an ideal personage, and a child of thirteen years.

And yet, amid this languor of mystical tradition, a personal feeling had sway. In this spirit which imitated, and that badly at times, which still groped for an outlet and now and then admitted into its polished stanzas the old, simple expressions and stale metaphors of heralds of arms and trouvères, there was already visible the Northern melancholy, the inner and gloomy emotion. This feature, which presently, at the finest moment of its richest blossom, in the splendid expansiveness of natural life, spreads a sombre tint over the poetry of Sidney, Spenser, Shakespeare, already in the first poet separates this pagan yet Teutonic world from the other, wholly voluptuous, which in Italy, with lively and refined irony, had no taste, except for art and pleasure. Surrey translated the Ecclesiastes into verse. Is it not singular, at this early hour, in this rising dawn, to find such a book in his hand? A disenchantment, a sad or bitter dreaminess, an innate consciousness of the vanity of human things, are never lacking in this country and in this race; the inhabitants support life with difficulty, and know how to speak of death. Surrey's finest verses bear witness thus soon to his serious bent, this instinctive and grave philosophy. He records his griefs, regretting his beloved Wyatt, his friend Clère, his companion the young Duke of Richmond, all dead in their prime. Alone, a prisoner at Windsor, he recalls the happy days they have passed together:

"So cruel prison how could betide, alas, As proud Windsor, where I in lust and joy, With a Kinges son, my childish years did pass, In greater feast than Priam's son of Troy. "Where each sweet place returns a taste full sour, The large green courts, where we were wont to hove, With eyes cast up into the Maiden's tower, And easy sighs, such as folk draw in love. "The stately seats, the ladies bright of hue, The dances short, long tales of great delight, With words and looks, that tigers could but rue; Where each of us did plead the other's right. "The palme-play, where, despoiled for the game, With dazed eyes oft we by gleams of love Have miss'd the ball, and got sight of our dame, To bait her eyes, which kept the leads above.... "The secret thoughts, imparted with such trust; The wanton talk, the divers change of play; The friendship sworn, each promise kept so just, Wherewith we past the winter night away. "And with his thought the blood forsakes the face; The tears berain my cheeks of deadly hue: The which, as soon as sobbing sighs, alas! Up-supped have, thus I my plaint renew: "O place of bliss! renewer of my woes! Give me account, where is my noble fere? Whom in thy walls thou dost each night enclose; To other lief; but unto me most dear. "Echo, alas! that doth my sorrow rue, Returns thereto a hollow sound of plaint."[295]

So in love, it is the sinking of a weary soul, to which he gives vent:

"For all things having life, sometime hath quiet rest; The bearing ass, the drawing ox, and every other beast; The peasant, and the post, that serves at all assays; The ship-boy, and the galley-slave, have time to take their ease; Save I, alas! whom care of force doth so constrain, To wail the day, and wake the night, continually in pain, From pensiveness to plaint, from plaint to bitter tears, From tears to painful plaint again; and thus my life it wears."[296]

That which brings joy to others brings him grief:

"The soote season, that bud and bloom forth brings, With green hath clad the hill, and eke the vale. The nightingale with feathers new she sings; The turtle to her mate hath told her tale. Summer is come, for every spray now springs; The hart has hung his old head on the pale; The buck in brake his winter coat he flings; The fishes flete with new repaired scale; The adder all her slough away she slings; The swift swallow pursueth the flies smale; The busy bee her honey now she mings; Winter is worn that was the flowers' bale. And thus I see among these pleasant things Each care decays, and yet my sorrow springs!"[297]

For all that, he will love on to his last sigh:

"Yea, rather die a thousand times, than once to false my faith; And if my feeble corpse, through weight of woful smart Do fail, or faint, my will it is that still she keep my heart. And when this carcass here to earth shall be refar'd, I do bequeath my wearied ghost to serve her afterward."[298]

An infinite love, and pure as Petrarch's; and she is worthy of it. In the midst of all these studied or imitated verses, an admirable portrait stands out, the simplest and truest we can imagine, a work of the heart now, and not of the memory, which behind the Madonna of chivalry shows the English wife, and beyond feudal gallantry domestic bliss. Surrey alone, restless, hears within him the firm tones of a good friend, a sincere counsellor, Hope, who speaks to him thus:

"For I assure thee, even by oath, And thereon take my hand and troth, That she is one of the worthiest, The truest, and the faithfullest; The gentlest and the meekest of mind That here on earth a man may find: And if that love and truth were gone, In her it might be found alone. For in her mind no thought there is, But how she may be true, I wis; And tenders thee and all thy heale, And wishes both thy health and weal; And loves thee even as far forth than As any woman may a man; And is thine own, and so she says; And cares for thee ten thousand ways. Of thee she speaks, on thee she thinks; With thee she eats, with thee she drinks; With thee she talks, with thee she moans; With thee she sighs, with thee she groans; With thee she says 'Farewell mine own!' When thou, God knows, full far art gone. And even, to tell thee all aright, To thee she says full oft 'Good night!' And names thee oft her own most dear, Her comfort, weal, and all her cheer; And tells her pillow all the tale How thou hast done her woe and bale; And how she longs, and plains for thee, And says, 'Why art thou so from me?' Am I not she that loves thee best! Do I not wish thine ease and rest? Seek I not how I may thee please? Why art thou then so from thine ease? If I be she for whom thou carest, For whom in torments so thou farest, Alas! thou knowest to find me here, Where I remain thine own most dear. Thine own most true, thine own most just, Thine own that loves thee still, and must; Thine own that cares alone for thee, As thou, I think, dost care for me; And even the woman, she alone, That is full bent to be thine own."[299]

Certainly it is of his wife[300] that he is thinking here, not of an imaginary Laura. The poetic dream of Petrarch has become the exact picture of deep and perfect conjugal affection, such as yet survives in England; such as all the poets, from the authoress of the "Nutbrown Maid" to Dickens,[301] have never failed to represent.

SECTION III.—Surrey's Style

An English Petrarch: no juster title could be given to Surrey, for it expresses his talent as well as his disposition. In fact, like Petrarch, the oldest of the humanists, and the earliest exact writer of the modern tongue, Surrey introduces a new style, the manly style, which marks a great change of the mind; for this new form of writing is the result of superior reflection, which, governing the primitive impulse, calculates and selects with an end in view. At last the intellect has grown capable of self-criticism, and actually criticises itself. It corrects its unconsidered works, infantine and incoherent, at once incomplete and superabundant; it strengthens and binds them together; it prunes and perfects them; it takes from them the master idea, to set it free and to show it clearly. This is what Surrey does, and his education had prepared him for it; for he had studied Vergil as well as Petrarch, and translated two books of the Æneid, almost verse for verse. In such company a man cannot but select his ideas and connect his phrases. After their example, Surrey gauges the means of striking the attention, assisting the intelligence, avoiding fatigue and weariness. He looks forward to the last line whilst writing the first. He keeps the strongest word for the last, and shows the symmetry of ideas by the symmetry of phrases. Sometimes he guides the intelligence by a continuous series of contrasts to the final image; a kind of sparkling casket, in which he means to deposit the idea which he carries, and to which he directs our attention from the first.[302] Sometimes he leads his reader to the close of a long flowery description, and then suddenly checks him with a sorrowful phrase.[303] He arranges his process, and knows how to produce effects; he uses even classical expressions, in which two substantives, each supported by its adjective, are balanced on either side of the verb.[304] He collects his phrases in harmonious periods, and does not neglect the delight of the ears any more than of the mind. By his inversions he adds force to his ideas, and weight to his argument. He selects elegant or noble terms, rejects idle words and redundant phrases. Every epithet contains an idea, every metaphor a sentiment. There is eloquence in the regular development of his thought; music in the sustained accent of his verse.

Such is the new-born art. Those who have ideas, now possess an instrument capable of expressing them. Like the Italian painters, who in fifty years had introduced or discovered all the technical tricks of the brush, English writers, in half a century, introduce or discover all the artifices of language, period, elevated style, heroic verse, soon the grand stanza, so effectually, that a little later the most perfect versifiers, Dryden, and Pope himself, says Dr. Nott, will add scarce anything to the rules, invented or applied, which were employed in the earliest efforts.[305] Even Surrey is too near to these authors, too constrained in his models, not sufficiently free; he has not yet felt the fiery blast of the age; we do not find in him a bold genius, an impassioned writer capable of wide expansion, but a courtier, a lover of elegance, who, penetrated by the beauties of two finished literatures, imitates Horace and the chosen masters of Italy, corrects and polishes little morsels, aims at speaking perfectly fine language. Amongst semi-barbarians he wears a full dress becomingly. Yet he does not wear it completely at his ease: he keeps his eyes too exclusively on his models, and does not venture on frank and free gestures. He is sometimes as a school-boy, makes too great use of "hot" and "cold," wounds and martyrdom. Although a lover, and a genuine one, he thinks too much that he must be so in Petrarch's manner, that his phrase must be balanced and his image kept up. I had almost said that, in his sonnets of disappointed love, he thinks less often of the strength of love than of the beauty of his writing. He has conceits, ill-chosen words; he uses trite expressions; he relates how Nature, having formed his lady, broke the mould, he assigns parts to Cupid and Venus; he employs the old machinery of the troubadours and the ancients, like a clever man who wishes to pass for a gallant. At first scarce any mind dares be quite itself: when a new art arises, the first artist listens not to his heart, but to his masters, and asks himself at every step whether he be setting foot on solid ground, or whether he is not stumbling.

SECTION IV.—Development of Artistic Ideas

Insensibly the growth became complete, and at the end of the century all was changed. A new, strange, overloaded style had been formed, destined to remain in force until the Restoration, not only in poetry, but also in prose, even in ceremonial speech and theological discourse,[306] so suitable to the spirit of the age that we meet with it at the same time throughout the world of Europe, in Ronsard and d'Aubigné, in Calderon, Gongora, and Marini. In 1580 appeared "Euphues, the Anatomy of Wit," by Lyly, which was its text-book, its masterpiece, its caricature, and was received with universal admiration.[307] "Our nation," says Edward Blount, "are in his debt for a new English which hee taught them. All our ladies were then his scollers; and that beautie in court who could not parley Euphuesme was as little regarded as shee which now there speakes not French." The ladies knew the phrases of Euphues by heart: strange, studied, and refined phrases, enigmatical; whose author seems of set purpose to seek the least natural expressions and the most farfetched, full of exaggeration and antithesis, in which mythological allusions, reminiscences from alchemy, botanical and astronomical metaphors, all the rubbish and medley of learning, travels, mannerism, roll in a flood of conceits and comparisons. Do not judge it by the grotesque picture that Walter Scott drew of it. Sir Piercie Shafton is but a pedant, a cold and dull copyist; it is its warmth and originality which give this style a true force and an accent of its own. You must conceive it, not as dead and inert, such as we have it to-day in old books, but springing from the lips of ladies and young lords in pearl-bedecked doublet, quickened by their vibrating voices, their laughter, the flash of their eyes, the motion of their hands as they played with the hilt of their swords or with their satin cloaks. They were full of life, their heads filled to overflowing; and they amused themselves, as our sensitive and eager artists do, at their ease in the studio. They did not speak to convince or be understood, but to satisfy their excited imagination, to expend their overflowing wit.[308] They played with words, twisted, put them out of shape, enjoyed sudden views, strong contrasts, which they produced one after another, ever and anon, and in great quantities. They cast flower on flower, tinsel on tinsel: everything sparkling delighted them; they gilded and embroidered and plumed their language like their garments. They cared nothing for clearness, order, common-sense; it was a festival of madness; absurdity pleased them. They knew nothing more tempting than a carnival of splendors and oddities; all was huddled together: a coarse gayety, a tender and sad word, a pastoral, a sounding flourish of unmeasured boasting, a gambol of a Jack-pudding. Eyes, ears, all the senses, eager and excited, are satisfied by this jingle of syllables, the display of fine high-colored words, the unexpected clash of droll or familiar images, the majestic roll of well-poised periods. Every one had his own oaths, his elegances, his style. "One would say," remarks Heylyn, "that they are ashamed of their mother-tongue, and do not find it sufficiently varied to express the whims of their mind." We no longer imagine this inventiveness, this boldness of fancy, this ceaseless fertility of nervous sensibility: there was no genuine prose at that time; the poetic flood swallowed it up. A word was not an exact symbol, as with us; a document which from cabinet to cabinet carried a precise thought. It was part of a complete action, a little drama; when they read it they did not take it by itself, but imagined it with the intonation of a hissing and shrill voice, with the puckering of the lips, the knitting of the brows, and the succession of pictures which crowd behind it, and which it calls forth in a flash of lightning. Each one mimics and pronounces it in his own style, and impresses his own soul upon it. It was a song, which like the poet's verse, contains a thousand things besides the literal sense, and manifests the depth, warmth, and sparkling of the source whence it flowed. For in that time, even when the man was feeble, his work lived; there is some pulse in the least productions of this age; force and creative fire signalize it; they penetrate through bombast and affectation. Lyly himself, so fantastic that he seems to write purposely in defiance of common-sense, is at times a genuine poet; a singer, a man capable of rapture, akin to Spenser and Shakespeare; one of those introspective dreamers who see dancing fairies, the purpled cheeks of goddesses, drunken, amorous woods, as he says

"Adorned with the presence of my love, The woods I fear such secret power shall prove, As they'll shut up each path, hide every way, Because they still would have her go astray."[309]

The reader must assist me, and assist himself. I cannot otherwise give him to understand what the men of this age had the felicity to experience.

Luxuriance and irregularity were the two features of this spirit and this literature—features common to all the literatures of the Renaissance, but more marked here than elsewhere, because the German race is not confined, like the Latin, by the taste for harmonious forms, and prefers strong impression to fine expression. We must select amidst this crowd of poets; and here is one amongst the first, who exhibits, by his writings as well as by his life, the greatness and the folly of the prevailing manners and the public taste: Sir Philip Sidney, nephew of the Earl of Leicester, a great lord and a man of action, accomplished in every kind of culture; who, after a good training in classical literature, travelled in France, Germany, and Italy; read Plato and Aristotle, studied astronomy and geometry at Venice; pondered over the Greek tragedies, the Italian sonnets, the pastorals of Montemayor, the poems of Ronsard; displaying an interest in science, keeping up an exchange of letters with the learned Hubert Languet; and withal a man of the world, a favorite of Elizabeth, having had enacted in her honor a flattering and comic pastoral; a genuine "jewel of the court"; a judge, like d'Urfé, of lofty gallantry and fine language; above all, chivalrous in heart and deed, who wished to follow maritime adventure with Drake, and, to crown all, fated to die an early and heroic death. He was a cavalry officer, and had saved the English army at Gravelines. Shortly after, mortally wounded, and dying of thirst, as some water was brought to him, he saw by his side a soldier still more desperately hurt, who was looking at the water with anguish in his face: "Give it to this man," said he; "his necessity is still greater than mine." Do not forget the vehemence and impetuosity of the Middle Ages; one hand ready for action, and kept incessantly on the hilt of the sword or poniard. "Mr. Molineux," wrote he to his father's secretary, "if ever I know you to do so much as read any letter I write to my father, without his commandment or my consent, I will thrust my dagger into you. And trust to it, for I speak it in earnest." It was the same man who said to his uncle's adversaries that they "lied in their throat"; and to support his words, promised them a meeting in three months in any place in Europe. The savage energy of the preceding age remains intact, and it is for this reason that poetry took so firm a hold on these virgin souls. The human harvest is never so fine as when cultivation opens up a new soil. Impassioned, moreover, melancholy and solitary, he naturally turned to noble and ardent fantasy; and he was so much the poet that he had no need of verse.

Shall I describe his pastoral epic, the "Arcadia"? It is but a recreation, a sort of poetical romance, written in the country for the amusement of his sister; a work of fashion, which, like "Cyrus" and "Clélie,"[310] is not a monument, but a document. This kind of books shows only the externals, the current elegance and politeness, the jargon of the fashionable world—in short, that which should be spoken before ladies; and yet we perceive from it the bent of the public opinion. In "Clélie," oratorical development, delicate and collected analysis, the flowing converse of men seated quietly in elegant arm-chairs; in the "Arcadia," fantastic imagination, excessive sentiment, a medley of events which suited men scarcely recovered from barbarism. Indeed, in London they still used to fire pistols at each other in the streets; and under Henry VIII and his children, Queens, a Protector, the highest nobles, knelt under the axe of the executioner. Armed and perilous existence long resisted in Europe the establishment of peaceful and quiet life. It was necessary to change society and the soil, in order to transform men of the sword into citizens. The high roads of Louis XIV and his regular administration, and more recently the railroads and the sergents de ville, freed the French from habits of violence and a taste for dangerous adventure. Remember that at this period men's heads were full of tragical images. Sidney's "Arcadia" contains enough of them to supply half a dozen epics. "It is a trifle," says the author; "my young head must be delivered." In the first twenty-five pages you meet with a shipwreck, an account of pirates, a half-drowned prince rescued by shepherds, a journey in Arcadia, various disguises, the retreat of a king withdrawn into solitude with his wife and children, the deliverance of a young imprisoned lord, a war against the Helots, the conclusion of peace, and many other things. Read on, and you will find princesses shut up by a wicked fairy, who beats them, and threatens them with death if they refuse to marry her son; a beautiful queen condemned to perish by fire if certain knights do not come to her succor; a treacherous prince tortured for his wicked deeds, then cast from the top of a pyramid; fights, surprises, abductions, travels: in short, the whole programme of the most romantic tales. That is the serious element: the agreeable is of a like nature; the fantastic predominates. Improbable pastoral serves, as in Shakespeare or Lope de Vega, for an intermezzo to improbable tragedy. You are always coming upon dancing shepherds. They are very courteous, good poets, and subtle metaphysicians. Several of them are disguised princes who pay their court to the princesses. They sing continually, and get up allegorical dances; two bands approach, servants of Reason and Passion; their hats, ribbons, and dress are described in full. They quarrel in verse, and their retorts, which follow close on one another, over-refined, keep up a tournament of wit. Who cared for what was natural or possible in this age? There were such festivals at Elizabeth's "progresses"; and you have only to look at the engravings of Sadeler, Martin de Vos, and Goltzius, to find this mixture of sensitive beauties and philosophical enigmas. The Countess of Pembroke and her ladies were delighted to picture this profusion of costumes and verses, this play beneath the trees. They had eyes in the sixteenth century, senses which sought satisfaction in poetry—the same satisfaction as in masquerading and painting. Man was not yet a pure reasoner; abstract truth was not enough for him. Rich stuffs, twisted about and folded; the sun to shine upon them, a large meadow studded with white daisies; ladies in brocaded dresses, with bare arms, crowns on their heads, instruments of music behind the trees—this is what the reader expects; he cares nothing for contrasts; he will readily accept a drawing-room in the midst of the fields.

What are they going to say there? Here comes out that nervous exaltation, in all its folly, which is characteristic of the spirit of the age; love rises to the thirty-sixth heaven. Musidorus is the brother of Céladon; Pamela is closely related to the severe heroines of "Astrée";[311] all the Spanish exaggerations abound and all the Spanish falsehoods. For in these works of fashion or of the Court, primitive sentiment never retains its sincerity: wit, the necessity to please, the desire for effect, of speaking better than others, alter it, influence it, heap up embellishments and refinements, so that nothing is left but twaddle. Musidorus wished to give Pamela a kiss. She repels him. He would have died on the spot; but luckily remembers that his mistress commanded him to leave her, and finds himself still able to obey her command. He complains to the trees, weeps in verse: there are dialogues where Echo, repeating the last word, replies; duets in rhyme, balanced stanzas, in which the theory of love is minutely detailed; in short, all the grand airs of ornamental poetry. If they send a letter to their mistress, they speak to it, tell the ink: "Therfore mourne boldly, my inke; for while shee lookes upon you, your blacknesse will shine: cry out boldly my lamentation; for while shee reades you, your cries will be musicke."[312]

Again, two young princesses are going to bed: "They impoverished their clothes to enrich their bed, which for that night might well scorne the shrine of Venus; and there cherishing one another with deare, though chaste embracements; with sweete, though cold kisses; it might seeme that love was come to play him there without dart, or that wearie of his owne fires, he was there to refresh himselfe betwen their sweete breathing lippes."[313]

In excuse of these follies, remember that they have their parallels in Shakespeare. Try rather to comprehend them, to imagine them in their place, with their surroundings, such as they are; that is, as the excess of singularity and inventive fire. Even though they mar now and then the finest ideas, yet a natural freshness pierces through the disguise. Take another example: "In the time that the morning did strew roses and violets in the heavenly floore against the coming of the sun, the nightingales (striving one with the other which could in most dainty varietie recount their wronge-caused sorrow) made them put off their sleep."

In Sidney's second work, "The Defence of Poesie," we meet with genuine imagination, a sincere and serious tone, a grand, commanding style, all the passion and elevation which he carries in his heart and puts into his verse. He is a muser, a Platonist, who is penetrated by the doctrines of the ancients, who takes things from a lofty point of view, who places the excellence of poetry not in pleasing effect, imitation, or rhyme, but in that creative and superior conception by which the artist creates anew and embellishes nature. At the same time, he is an ardent man, trusting in the nobleness of his aspirations and in the width of his ideas, who puts down the brawling of the shoppy, narrow, vulgar Puritanism, and glows with the lofty irony, the proud freedom, of a poet and a lord.

In his eyes, if there is any art or science capable of augmenting and cultivating our generosity, it is poetry. He draws comparison after comparison between it and philosophy or history, whose pretensions he laughs at and dismisses.[314] He fights for poetry as a knight for his lady, and in what heroic and splendid style! He says: "I never heard the old Song of Percie and Douglas, that I found not my heart moved more than with a trumpet: and yet it is sung but by some blinde Crowder, with no rougher voyce, than rude stile; which beeing so evill apparelled in the dust and Cobweb of that uncivil age, what would it work, trimmed in the gorgeous eloquence of Pindare?"[315]

The philosopher repels, the poet attracts: "Nay hee doth as if your journey should lye through a faire vineyard, at the very first, give you a cluster of grapes, that full of that taste, you may long to passe further."[316]

What description of poetry can displease you? Not pastoral so easy and genial? "Is it the bitter but wholesome Iambicke, who rubbes the galled minde, making shame the Trumpet of villanie, with bold and open crying out against naughtinesse?"[317]

At the close he reviews his arguments, and the vibrating martial accent of his political period is like a trump of victory: "So that since the excellencies of it (poetry) may bee so easily and so justly confirmed, and the low-creeping objections so soone trodden downe, it not being an Art of lyes, but of true doctrine: not of effeminatenesse, but of notable stirring of courage; not of abusing man's wit, but of strengthening man's wit; not banished, but honoured by Plato; let us rather plant more Laurels for to ingarland the Poets heads than suffer the ill-savoured breath of such wrong speakers, once to blow upon the cleare springs of Poesie."[318]

From such vehemence and gravity you may anticipate what his verses will be.

Often, after reading the poets of this age, I have looked for some time at the contemporary prints, telling myself that man, in mind and body, was not then such as we see him to-day. We also have our passions, but we are no longer strong enough to bear them. They unsettle us; we are no longer poets without suffering for it. Alfred de Musset, Heine, Edgar Poe, Burns, Byron, Shelley, Cowper, how many shall I instance? Disgust, mental and bodily degradation, disease, impotence, madness, suicide, at best a permanent hallucination or feverish raving—these are nowadays the ordinary issues of the poetic temperament. The passion of the brain gnaws our vitals, dries up the blood, eats into the marrow, shakes us like a tempest, and the human frame, such as civilization has made us, is not substantial enough long to resist it. They, who have been more roughly trained, who are more inured to the inclemencies of climate, more hardened by bodily exercise, more firm against danger, endure and live. Is there a man living who could withstand the storm of passions and visions which swept over Shakespeare, and end, like him, as a sensible citizen and landed proprietor in his small county? The muscles were firmer, despair less prompt. The rage of concentrated attention, the half hallucinations, the anguish and heaving of the breast, the quivering of the limbs bracing themselves involuntarily and blindly for action, all the painful yearnings which accompany grand desires, exhausted them less; this is why they desired longer, and dared more. D'Aubigné, wounded with many sword-thrusts, conceiving death at hand, had himself bound on his horse that he might see his mistress once more, and rode thus several leagues, losing blood all the way, and arriving in a swoon. Such feelings we glean still from their portraits, in the straight looks which pierce like a sword; in that strength of back, bent or twisted; in the sensuality, energy, enthusiasm, which breathe from their attitude or look. Such feelings we still discover in their poetry, in Greene, Lodge, Jonson, Spenser, Shakespeare, in Sidney, as in all the rest. We quickly forget the faults of taste which accompany them, the affectation, the uncouth jargon. Is it really so uncouth? Imagine a man who with closed eyes distinctly sees the adored countenance of his mistress, who keeps it before him all the day; who is troubled and shaken as he imagines ever and anon her brow, her lips, her eyes; who cannot and will not be separated from his vision; who sinks daily deeper in this passionate contemplation; who is every instant crushed by mortal anxieties, or transported by the raptures of bliss: he will lose the exact conception of objects. A fixed idea becomes a false idea. By dint of regarding an object under all its forms, turning it over, piercing through it, we at last deform it. When we cannot think of a thing without being dazed and without tears, we magnify it, and give it a character which it has not. Hence strange comparisons, over-refined ideas, excessive images, become natural. However far Sidney goes, whatever object he touches, he sees throughout the universe only the name and features of Stella. All ideas bring him back to her. He is drawn ever and invincibly by the same thought: and comparisons which seem farfetched, only express the unfailing presence and sovereign power of the besetting image. Stella is ill; it seems to Sidney that "Joy, which is inseparate from those eyes, Stella, now learnes (strange case) to weepe in thee."[319] To us, the expression is absurd. Is it so for Sidney, who for hours together had dwelt on the expression of those eyes, seeing in them at last all the beauties of heaven and earth, who, compared to them, finds all light dull and all happiness stale? Consider that in every extreme passion ordinary laws are reversed, that our logic cannot pass judgment on it, that we find in it affectation, childishness, witticisms, crudity, folly, and that to us violent conditions of the nervous machine are like an unknown and marvellous land, where common-sense and good language cannot penetrate. On the return of spring, when May spreads over the fields her dappled dress of new flowers, Astrophel and Stella sit in the shade of a retired grove, in the warm air, full of birds' voices and pleasant exhalations. Heaven smiles, the wind kisses the trembling leaves, the inclining trees interlace their sappy branches, amorous earth swallows greedily the rippling water:

"In a grove most rich of shade, Where birds wanton musike made, May, then yong, his py'd weeds showing, New perfum'd with flowers fresh growing, "Astrophel with Stella sweet, Did for mutuall comfort meet, Both within themselves oppressed, But each in the other blessed.... "Their eares hungry of each word, Which the deere tongue would afford, But their tongues restrain'd from walking, Till their hearts had ended talking. "But when their tongues could not speake, Love it selfe did silence breake; Love did set his lips asunder, Thus to speake in love and wonder.... "This small winde which so sweet is, See how it the leaves doth kisse, Each tree in his best attyring, Sense of love to love inspiring."[320]

On his knees, with beating heart, oppressed, it seems to him that his mistress becomes transformed:

"Stella, soveraigne of my joy,... Stella, starre of heavenly fire, Stella, load-starre of desire, Stella, in whose shining eyes Are the lights of Cupid's skies.... Stella, whose voice when it speakes Senses all asunder breakes; Stella, whose voice when it singeth, Angels to acquaintance bringeth."[321]

These cries of adoration are like a hymn. Every day he writes thoughts of love which agitate him, and in this long journal of a hundred pages we feel the heated breath swell each moment. A smile from his mistress, a curl lifted by the wind, a gesture—all are events. He paints her in every attitude; he cannot see her too constantly. He talks to the birds, plants, winds, all nature. He brings the whole world to Stella's feet. At the notion of a kiss he swoons:

"Thinke of that most gratefull time, When thy leaping heart will climbe, In my lips to have his biding. There those roses for to kisse, Which doe breath a sugred blisse, Opening rubies, pearles dividing."[322] "O joy, too high for my low stile to show: O blisse, fit for a nobler state than me: Envie, put out thine eyes, lest thou do see What Oceans of delight in me do flow. My friend, that oft saw through all maskes my wo, Come, come, and let me powre my selfe on thee; Gone is the winter of my miserie, My spring appeares, O see what here doth grow, For Stella hath with words where faith doth shine, Of her high heart giv'n me the monarchie: I, I, O I may say that she is mine."[323]

There are Oriental splendors in the dazzling sonnet in which he asks why Stella's cheeks have grown pale:

"Where be those Roses gone, which sweetned so our eyes? Where those red cheekes, with oft with faire encrease doth frame The height of honour in the kindly badge of shame? Who hath the crimson weeds stolne from my morning skies?"[324]

As he says, his "life melts with too much thinking." Exhausted by ecstasy, he pauses; then he flies from thought to thought, seeking relief for his wound, like the Satyr whom he describes:

"Prometheus, when first from heaven hie He brought downe fire, ere then on earth not seene, Fond of delight, a Satyr standing by, Gave it a kisse, as it like sweet had beene. "Feeling forthwith the other burning power, Wood with the smart with showts and shryking shrill, He sought his ease in river, field, and bower, But for the time his griefe went with him still."[325]

At last calm returned; and whilst this calm lasts, the lively, glowing spirit plays like a flickering flame on the surface of the deep brooding fire. His love-songs and word-portraits, delightful pagan and chivalric fancies, seem to be inspired by Petrarch or Plato. We feel the charm and sportiveness under the seeming affectation:

"Faire eyes, sweete lips, deare heart, that foolish I Could hope by Cupids helpe on you to pray; Since to himselfe he doth your gifts apply, As his maine force, choise sport, and easefull stray. "For when he will see who dare him gainsay, Then with those eyes he lookes, lo by and by Each soule doth at Loves feet his weapons lay, Glad if for her he give them leave to die. "When he will play, then in her lips he is, Where blushing red, that Loves selfe them doth love, With either lip he doth the other kisse: But when he will for quiets sake remove From all the world, her heart is then his rome, Where well he knowes, no man to him can come."[326]

Both heart and sense are captive here. If he finds the eyes of Stella more beautiful than anything in the world, he finds her soul more lovely than her body. He is a Platonist when he recounts how Virtue, wishing to be loved of men, took Stella's form to enchant their eyes, and make them see the heaven which the inner sense reveals to heroic souls. We recognize in him that entire submission of heart, love turned into a religion, perfect passion which asks only to grow, and which, like the piety of the mystics, finds itself always too insignificant when it compares itself with the object loved:

"My youth doth waste, my knowledge brings forth toyes, My wit doth strive those passions to defend, Which for reward spoyle it with vaine annoyes, I see my course to lose my selfe doth bend: I see and yet no greater sorrow take, Than that I lose no more for Stella's sake."[327]

At last, like Socrates in the banquet, he turns his eyes to deathless beauty, heavenly brightness:

"Leave me, O Love, which reachest but to dust, And thou my minde aspire to higher things: Grow rich in that which never taketh rust: Whatever fades, but fading pleasure brings.... O take fast hold, let that light be thy guide, In this small course which birth drawes out to death."[328]

Divine love continues the earthly love; he was imprisoned in this, and frees himself. By this nobility, these lofty aspirations, recognize one of those serious souls of which there are so many in the same climate and race. Spiritual instincts pierce through the dominant paganism, and ere they make Christians, make Platonists.

SECTION V.—Wherein Lies the Strength of the Poetry of this Period

Sidney was only a soldier in an army; there is a multitude about him, a multitude of poets. In fifty-two years, without counting the drama, two hundred and thirty-three are enumerated,[329] of whom forty have genius or talent: Breton, Donne, Drayton, Lodge, Greene, the two Fletchers, Beaumont, Spenser, Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Marlowe, Wither, Warner, Davison, Carew, Suckling, Herrick; we should grow tired in counting them. There is a crop of them, and so there is at the same time in Catholic and heroic Spain; and as in Spain it was a sign of the times, the mark of a public want, the index to an extraordinary and transient condition of the mind. What is this condition which gives rise to so universal a taste for poetry? What is it breathes life into their books? How happens it that amongst the least, in spite of pedantries, awkwardnesses, in the rhyming chronicles or descriptive cyclopedias, we meet with brilliant pictures and genuine love-cries? How happens it that when this generation was exhausted, true poetry ended in England, as true painting in Italy and Flanders? It was because an epoch of the mind came and passed away—that, namely, of instinctive and creative conception. These men had new senses, and no theories in their heads. Thus, when they took a walk, their emotions were not the same as ours. What is sunrise to an ordinary man? A white smudge on the edge of the sky, between bosses of clouds, amid pieces of land, and bits of road, which he does not see because he has seen them a hundred times. But for them, all things have a soul; I mean that they feel within themselves, indirectly, the uprising and severance of the outlines, the power and contrast of tints, the sad or delicious sentiment, which breathes from this combination and union like a harmony or a cry. How sorrowful is the sun, as he rises in a mist above the sad sea-furrows; what an air of resignation in the old trees rustling in the night rain; what a feverish tumult in the mass of waves, whose dishevelled locks are twisted forever on the surface of the abyss! But the great torch of heaven, the luminous god, emerges and shines; the tall, soft, pliant herbs, the evergreen meadows, the expanding roof of lofty oaks—the whole English landscape, continually renewed and illumined by the flooding moisture, diffuses an inexhaustible freshness. These meadows, red and white with flowers, ever moist and ever young, slip off their veil of golden mist, and appear suddenly, timidly, like beautiful virgins. Here is the cuckoo-flower, which springs up before the coming of the swallow; there the hare-bell, blue as the veins of a woman; the marigold, which sets with the sun, and, weeping, rises with him. Drayton, in his "Polyolbion," sings

"Then from her burnisht gate the goodly glittring East Guilds every lofty top, which late the humorous Night Bespangled had with pearle, to please the Mornings sight; On which the mirthfull Quires, with their cleere open throats, Unto the joyfull Morne so straine their warbling notes, That Hills and Valleys ring, and even the ecchoing Ayre Seemes all compos'd of sounds, about them everywhere.... Thus sing away the Morne, untill the mounting Sunne, Through thick exhaled fogs, his golden head hath runne, And through the twisted tops of our close Covert creeps, To kiss the gentle Shade, this while that sweetly sleeps."[330]

A step further, and you will find the old gods reappear. They reappear, these living gods—these living gods mingled with things which you cannot help meeting as soon as you meet nature again. Shakespeare, in the "Tempest," sings:

"Ceres, most bounteous lady thy rich leas Of wheat, rye, barley, vetches, oats, and pease; Thy turfy mountains, where live nibbling sheep, And flat meads thatch'd with stover, them to keep; Thy banks with peoned and lilied brims, Which spongy April at thy hest betrims, To make cold nymphs chaste crowns... Hail, many-colour'd messenger (Iris)... Who, with thy saffron wings, upon my flowers Diffusest honey-drops, refreshing showers, And with each end of thy blue bow dost crown My bosky acres and my unshrubb'd down."[331]

In "Cymbeline" he says:

"They are as gentle as zephyrs, blowing below the violet. Not wagging his sweet head."[332]

Greene writes:

"When Flora, proud in pomp of all her flowers, Sat bright and gay, And gloried in the dew of Iris' showers, And did display Her mantle chequered all with gaudy green."[333]

The same author also says:

"How oft have I descending Titan seen, His burning locks couch in the sea-queen's lap; And beauteous Thetis his red body wrap In watery robes, as he her lord had been!"[334]

So Spenser, in his "Faërie Queene," sings:

"The joyous day gan early to appeare; And fayre Aurora from the deawy bed Of aged Tithone gan herselfe to reare With rosy cheekes, for shame as blushing red: Her golden locks, for hast, were loosely shed About her eares, when Una her did marke Clymbe to her charet, all with flowers spred, From heven high to chace the chearelesse darke; With mery note her lowd salutes the mounting larke."[335]

All the splendor and sweetness of this moist and well-watered land; all the specialties, the opulence of its dissolving tints, of its variable sky, its luxuriant vegetation, assemble thus about the gods, who gave them their beautiful form.

In the life of every man there are moments when, in presence of objects, he experiences a shock. This mass of ideas, of mangled recollections, of mutilated images, which lie hidden in all corners of his mind, are set in motion, organized, suddenly developed like a flower. He is enraptured; he cannot help looking at and admiring the charming creature which has just appeared; he wishes to see it again, and others like it, and dreams of nothing else. There are such moments in the life of nations, and this is one of them. They are happy in contemplating beautiful things, and wish only that they should be the most beautiful possible. They are not preoccupied, as we are, with theories. They do not excite themselves to express moral or philosophical ideas. They wish to enjoy through the imagination, through the eyes, like those Italian nobles, who, at the same time, were so captivated by fine colors and forms that they covered with paintings not only their rooms and their churches, but the lids of their chests and the saddles of their horses. The rich and green sunny country; young, gayly attired ladies, blooming with health and love; half-draped gods and goddesses, masterpieces and models of strength and grace—these are the most lovely objects which man can contemplate, the most capable of satisfying his senses and his heart—of giving rise to smiles and joy; and these are the objects which occur in all the poets in a most wonderful abundance of songs, pastorals, sonnets, little fugitive pieces, so lively, delicate, easily unfolded, that we have never since had their equals. What though Venus and Cupid have lost their altars? Like the contemporary painters of Italy, they willingly imagine a beautiful naked child, drawn on a chariot of gold through the limpid air; or a woman, redolent with youth, standing on the waves, which kiss her snowy feet. Harsh Ben Jonson is ravished with the scene. The disciplined battalion of his sturdy verses changes into a band of little graceful strophes, which trip as lightly as Raphael's children. He sees his lady approach, sitting on the chariot of Love, drawn by swans and doves. Love leads the car; she passes calm and smiling, and all hearts, charmed by her divine looks, wish no other joy than to see and serve her forever.

"See the chariot at hand here of Love, Wherein my lady rideth! Each that draws is a swan or a dove, And well the car Love guideth. As she goes, all hearts do duty Unto her beauty; And, enamoured, do wish, so they might But enjoy such a sight, That they still were to run by her side, Through swords, through seas, whither she would ride. Do but look on her eyes, they do light All that Love's world compriseth! Do but look on her hair, it is bright As Love's star when it riseth!... Have you seen but a bright lily grow, Before rude hands have touched it? Have you marked but the fall o' the snow, Before the soil hath smutched it? Have you felt the wool of beaver? Or swan's down ever? Or have smelt o' the bud o' the brier? Or the nard in the fire? Or have tasted the bag of the bee? O so white! O so soft! O so sweet is she!"[336]

What can be more lively, more unlike measured and artificial mythology? Like Theocritus and Moschus, they play with their smiling gods, and their belief becomes a festival. One day, in an alcove of a wood, Cupid meets a nymph asleep:

"Her golden hair o'erspread her face, Her careless arms abroad were cast, Her quiver had her pillow's place, Her breast lay bare to every blast."[337]

He approaches softly, steals her arrows, and puts his own in their place. She hears a noise at last, raises her reclining head, and sees a shepherd approaching. She flees; he pursues. She bends her bow, and shoots her arrows at him. He only becomes more ardent, and is on the point of seizing her. In despair, she takes an arrow, and buries it in her lovely body. Lo! she is changed, she stops, smiles, loves, draws near him.

"Though mountains meet not, lovers may. What other lovers do, did they. The god of Love sat on a tree, And laught that pleasant sight to see."[338]

A drop of archness falls into the medley of artlessness and voluptuous charm; it was so in Longus, and in all that delicious nosegay called the Anthology. Not the dry mocking of Voltaire, of folks who possessed only wit, and always lived in a drawing-room; but the raillery of artists, lovers whose brain is full of color and form, who, when they recount a bit of roguishness, imagine a stooping neck, lowered eyes, the blushing of vermilion cheeks. One of these fair ones says the following verses, simpering, and we can even see now the pouting of her lips:

"Love in my bosom like a bee Doth suck his sweet. Now with his wings he plays with me, Now with his feet. Within my eyes he makes his rest, His bed amid my tender breast, My kisses are his daily feast. And yet he robs me of my rest. Ah! wanton, will ye!"[339]

What relieves these sportive pieces is their splendor of imagination. There are effects and flashes which we hardly dare quote, dazzling and maddening, as in the Song of Songs:

"Her eyes, fair eyes, like to the purest lights That animate the sun, or cheer the day; In whom the shining sunbeams brightly play, Whiles fancy doth on them divine delights. "Her cheeks like ripened lilies steeped in wine, Or fair pomegranate kernels washed in milk, Or snow-white threads in nets of crimson silk, Or gorgeous clouds upon the sun's decline. "Her lips are roses over-washed with dew, Or like the purple of Narcissus' flower... "Her crystal chin like to the purest mould, Enchased with dainty daisies soft and white, Where fancy's fair pavilion once is pight, Whereas embraced his beauties he doth hold. "Her neck like to an ivory shining tower, Where through with azure veins sweet nectar runs, Or like the down of swans where Senesse woons, Or like delight that doth itself devour. "Her paps are like fair apples in the prime, As round as orient pearls, as soft as down; They never vail their fair through winter's frown, But from their sweets love sucked his summer time."[340] "What need compare, where sweet exceeds compare? Who draws his thoughts of love from senseless things, Their pomp and greatest glories doth impair, And mounts love's heaven with overladen wings."[341]

I can well believe that things had no more beauty then than now; but I am sure that men found them more beautiful.

When the power of embellishment is so great, it is natural that they should paint the sentiment which unites all joys, whither all dreams converge—ideal love, and in particular, artless and happy love. Of all sentiments, there is none for which we have more sympathy. It is of all the most simple and sweet. It is the first motion of the heart, and the first word of nature. It is made up of innocence and self-abandonment. It is clear of reflection and effort. It extricates us from complicated passion, contempt, regret, hate, violent desires. It penetrates us, and we breathe it as the fresh breath of the morning wind, which has swept over flowery meads. The knights of this perilous court inhaled it, and were enraptured, and so rested in the contrast from their actions and their dangers. The most severe and tragic of their poets turned aside to meet it, Shakespeare among the evergreen oaks of the forest of Arden,[342] Ben Jonson in the woods of Sherwood,[343] amid the wide shady glades, the shining leaves and moist flowers, trembling on the margin of lonely springs. Marlowe himself, the terrible painter of the agony of Edward II, the impressive and powerful poet, who wrote "Faustus, Tamerlane" and the "Jew of Malta," leaves his sanguinary dramas, his high-sounding verse, his images of fury, and nothing can be more musical and sweet than his song. A shepherd, to gain his lady-love, says to her:

"Come live with me and be my Love, And we will all the pleasures prove That hills and valleys, dale and field, And all the craggy mountains yield. There we will sit upon the rocks, And see the shepherds feed their flocks, By shallow rivers, to whose falls Melodious birds sing madrigals. There will I make thee beds of roses And a thousand fragrant posies, A cap of flowers, and a kirtle Embroider'd all with leaves of myrtle. A gown made of the finest wool, Which from our pretty lambs we pull, Fair lined slippers for the cold, With buckles of the purest gold. A belt of straw and ivy buds, With coral clasps and amber studs; And if these pleasures may thee move, Come live with me and be my Love.... The shepherd swains shall dance and sing For thy delight each May-morning: If these delights thy mind may move, Then live with me and be my Love."[344]

The unpolished gentlemen of the period, returning from hawking, were more than once arrested by such rustic pictures; such as they were, that is to say, imaginative and not very citizen-like, they had dreamed of figuring in them on their own account. But while entering into, they reconstructed them; they reconstructed them in their parks, prepared for Queen Elizabeth's entrance, with a profusion of costumes and devices, not troubling themselves to copy rough nature exactly. Improbability did not disturb them; they were not minute imitators, students of manners: they created; the country for them was but a setting, and the complete picture came from their fancies and their hearts. Romantic it may have been, even impossible, but it was on this account the more charming. Is there a greater charm than putting on one side this actual world which fetters or oppresses us, to float vaguely and easily in the azure and the light, on the summit of the cloud-capped land of fairies, to arrange things according to the pleasure of the moment, no longer feeling the oppressive laws, the harsh and resisting framework of life, adorning and varying everything after the caprice and the refinements of fancy? That is what is done in these little poems. Usually the events are such as happen nowhere, or happen in the land where kings turn shepherds and marry shepherdesses. The beautiful Argentile[345] is detained at the court of her uncle, who wishes to deprive her of her kingdom, and commands her to marry Curan, a boor in his service; she flees, and Curan in despair goes and lives two years among the shepherds. One day he meets a beautiful country-woman, and loves her; gradually, while speaking to her, he thinks of Argentile, and weeps; he describes her sweet face, her lithe figure, her blue-veined delicate wrists, and suddenly sees that the peasant girl is weeping. She falls into his arms, and says, "I am Argentile." Now Curan was a king's son, who had disguised himself thus for love of Argentile. He resumes his armor, and defeats the wicked king. There never was a braver knight; and they both reigned long in Northumberland. From a hundred such tales, tales of the spring-time, the reader will perhaps bear with me while I pick out one more, gay and simple as a May morning. The Princess Dowsabel came down one morning into her father's garden: she gathers honeysuckles, primroses, violets, and daisies; then, behind a hedge, she heard a shepherd singing, and that so finely that she loved him at once. He promises to be faithful, and asks for a kiss. Her cheeks became as crimson as a rose:

"With that she bent her snow white knee, Down by the shepherd kneeled she, And him she sweetly kiss'd. With that the shepherd whoop'd for joy; Quoth he: 'There's never shepherd's boy That ever was so blest.'"[346]

Nothing more; is it not enough? It is but a moment's fancy; but they had such fancies every moment. Think what poetry was likely to spring from them, how superior to common events, how free from literal imitation, how smitten with ideal beauty, how capable of creating a world beyond our sad world. In fact, among all these poems there is one truly divine, so divine that the reasoners of succeeding ages have found it wearisome, that even now but few understand it—Spenser's "Faërie Queene." One day M. Jourdain, having turned Mamamouchi[347] and learned orthography, sent for the most illustrious writers of the age. He settled himself in his arm-chair, pointed with his finger at several folding-stools for them to sit down, and said:

"I have read your little productions, gentlemen. They have afforded me much pleasure. I wish to give you some work to do. I have given some lately to little Lulli,[348] your fellow-laborer. It was at my command that he introduced the sea-shell at his concerts—a melodious instrument, which no one thought of before, and which has such a pleasing effect. I insist that you will work out my ideas as he has worked them out, and I give you an order for a poem in prose. What is not prose, you know, is verse; and what is not verse is prose. When I say, 'Nicolle, bring me my slippers and give me my nightcap,' I speak prose. Take this sentence as your model. This style is much more pleasing than the jargon of unfinished lines which you call verse. As for the subject, let it be myself. You will describe my flowered dressing-gown which I have put on to receive you in, and this little green velvet undress which I wear underneath, to do my morning exercise in. You will set down that this chintz costs a louis an ell. The description, if well worked out, will furnish some very pretty paragraphs, and will enlighten the public as to the cost of things. I desire also that you should speak of my mirrors, my carpets, my hangings. My tradesmen will let you have their bills; don't fail to put them in. I shall be glad to read in your works, all fully and naturally set forth, about my father's shop, who, like a real gentleman, sold cloth to oblige his friends; my maid Nicolle's kitchen, the genteel behavior of Brusquet, the little dog of my neighbor M. Dimanche. You might also explain my domestic affairs: there is nothing more interesting to the public than to hear how a million may be scraped together. Tell them also that my daughter Lucile has not married that little rascal Cléonte, but M. Samuel Bernard, who made his fortune as a fermier-général, keeps his carriage and is going to be a minister of state. For this I will pay you liberally, half a louis for a yard of writing. Come back in a month, and let me see what my ideas have suggested to you."

We are the descendants of M. Jourdain, and this is how we have been talking to the men of genius from the beginning of the century, and the men of genius have listened to us. Hence arise our shoppy and realistic novels. I pray the reader to forget them, to forget himself, to become for a while a poet, a gentleman, a man of the sixteenth century. Unless we bury the M. Jourdain who survives in us, we shall never understand Spenser.

SECTION VI.—Edmund Spenser

Spenser belonged to an ancient family, allied to great houses; was a friend to Sidney and Raleigh, the two most accomplished knights of the age—a knight himself, at least in heart; who had found in his connections, his friendships, his studies, his life, everything calculated to lead him to ideal poetry. We find him at Cambridge, where he imbues himself with the noblest ancient philosophies; in a northern country, where he passes through a deep and unfortunate passion; at Penshurst, in the castle and in the society where the "Arcadia" was produced; with Sidney, in whom survived entire the romantic poetry and heroic generosity of the feudal spirit; at court, where all the splendors of a disciplined and gorgeous chivalry were gathered about the throne; finally, at Kilcolman, on the borders of a lake, in a lonely castle, from which the view embraced an amphitheatre of mountains, and the half of Ireland. Poor on the other hand,[349] not fit for court, and though favored by the queen, unable to obtain from his patrons anything but inferior employment; in the end, wearied of solicitations, and banished to his dangerous property in Ireland, whence a rebellion expelled him, after his house and child had been burned; he died three months later, of misery and a broken heart.[350] Expectations and rebuffs, many sorrows and many dreams, some few joys, and a sudden and frightful calamity, a small fortune and a premature end; this indeed was a poet's life. But the heart within was the true poet—from it all proceeded; circumstances furnished the subject only; he transformed them more than they him; he received less than he gave. Philosophy and landscapes, ceremonies and ornaments, splendors of the country and the court, on all which he painted or thought, he impressed his inward nobleness. Above all, his was a soul captivated by sublime and chaste beauty, eminently platonic; one of these lofty and refined souls most charming of all, who, born in the lap of nature, draw thence their sustenance, but soar higher, enter the regions of mysticism, and mount instinctively in order to expand on the confines of a loftier world. Spenser leads us to Milton, and thence to Puritanism, as Plato to Vergil, and thence to Christianity. Sensuous beauty is perfect in both, but their main worship is for moral beauty. He appeals to the Muses:

"Revele to me the sacred noursery Of vertue, which with you doth there remaine, Where it in silver bowre does hidden ly From view of men and wicked worlds disdaine!"

He encourages his knight when he sees him droop. He is wroth when he sees him attacked. He rejoices in his justice, temperance, courtesy. He introduces in the beginning of a song, long stanzas in honor of friendship and justice. He pauses, after relating a lovely instance of chastity, to exhort women to modesty. He pours out the wealth of his respect and tenderness at the feet of his heroines. If any coarse man insults them, he calls to their aid nature and the gods. Never does he bring them on his stage without adorning their name with splendid eulogy. He has an adoration for beauty worthy of Dante and Plotinus. And this, because he never considers it a mere harmony of color and form, but an emanation of unique, heavenly, imperishable beauty, which no mortal eye can see, and which is the masterpiece of the great Author of the worlds.[351] Bodies only render it visible; it does not live in them; charm and attraction are not in things, but in the immortal idea which shines through them:

"For that same goodly hew of white and red, With which the cheekes are sprinckled, shall decay, And those sweete rosy leaves, so fairly spred Upon the lips, shall fade and fall away To that they were, even to corrupted clay: That golden wyre, those sparckling stars so bright, Shall turne to dust, and lose their goodly light. But that faire lampe, from whose celestiall ray That light proceedes, which kindleth lovers fire, Shall never be extinguisht nor decay; But, when the vitall spirits doe expyre, Upon her native planet shall retyre; For it is heavenly borne, and cannot die, Being a parcell of the purest skie."[352]

In presence of this ideal of beauty, love is transformed:

"For Love is lord of Truth and Loialtie, Lifting himself out of the lowly dust, On golden plumes up to the purest skie, Above the reach of loathly sinfull lust, Whose base affect through cowardly distrust Of his weake wings dare not to heaven fly, But like a moldwarpe in the earth doth ly."[353]

Love such as this contains all that is good, and fine, and noble. It is the prime source of life, and the eternal soul of things. It is this love which, pacifying the primitive discord, has created the harmony of the spheres, and maintains this glorious universe. It dwells in God, and is God himself, come down in bodily form to regenerate the tottering world and save the human race; around and within animated beings, when our eyes can pierce outward appearances, we behold it as a living light, penetrating and embracing every creature. We touch here the sublime sharp summit where the world of mind and the world of sense unite; where man, gathering with both hands the loveliest flowers of either, feels himself at the same time a pagan and a Christian.

So much, as a testimony to his heart. But he was also a poet, that is, pre-eminently a creator and a dreamer, and that most naturally, instinctively, unceasingly. We might go on forever describing this inward condition of all great artists; there would still remain much to be described. It is a sort of mental growth with them; at every instant a bud shoots forth, and on this another and still another; each producing, increasing, blooming of itself, so that after a few moments we find first a green plant crop up, then a thicket, then a forest. A character appears to them, then an action, then a landscape, then a succession of actions, characters, landscapes, producing, completing, arranging themselves by instinctive development, as when in a dream we behold a train of figures which, without any outward compulsion, display and group themselves before our eyes. This fount of living and changing forms is inexhaustible in Spenser; he is always imaging; it is his specialty. He has but to close his eyes, and apparitions arise; they abound in him, crowd, overflow; in vain he pours them forth; they continually float up, more copious and more dense. Many times, following the inexhaustible stream, I have thought of the vapors which rise incessantly from the sea, ascend, sparkle, commingle their golden and snowy scrolls, while underneath them new mists arise, and others again beneath, and the splendid procession never grows dim or ceases.

But what distinguishes him from all others is the mode of his imagination. Generally with a poet his mind ferments vehemently and by fits and starts; his ideas gather, jostle each other, suddenly appear in masses and heaps, and burst forth in sharp, piercing, concentrative words; it seems that they need these sudden accumulations to imitate the unity and life-like energy of the objects which they reproduce; at least almost all the poets of that time, Shakespeare at their head, act thus. Spenser remains calm in the fervor of invention. The visions which would be fever to another, leave him at peace. They come and unfold themselves before him, easily, entire, uninterrupted, without starts. He is epic, that is, a narrator, not a singer like an ode-writer, nor a mimic like a play-writer. No modern is more like Homer. Like Homer and the great epic-writers, he only presents consecutive and noble, almost classical images, so nearly ideas, that the mind seizes them unaided and unawares. Like Homer, he is always simple and clear: he makes no leaps, he omits no argument, he robs no word of its primitive and ordinary meaning, he preserves the natural sequence of ideas. Like Homer, again, he is redundant, ingenuous, even childish. He says everything, he puts down reflections which we have made beforehand; he repeats without limit his grand ornamental epithets. We can see that he beholds objects in a beautiful uniform light, with infinite detail; that he wishes to show all this detail, never fearing to see his happy dream change or disappear; that he traces its outline with a regular movement, never hurrying or slackening. He is even a little prolix, too unmindful of the public, too ready to lose himself and dream about the things he beholds. His thought expands in vast repeated comparisons, like those of the old Ionic poet. If a wounded giant falls, he finds him

"As an aged tree, High growing on the top of rocky clift, Whose hart-strings with keene steele nigh hewen be, The mightie trunck halfe rent with ragged rift, Doth roll adowne the rocks, and fall with fearefull drift. "Or as a castle, reared high and round, By subtile engins and malitious slight Is undermined from the lowest ground, And her foundation forst, and feebled quight, At last downe falles; and with her heaped hight Her hastie ruine does more heavie make, And yields it selfe unto the victours might: Such was this Gyaunt's fall, that seemd to shake The stedfast globe of earth, as it for feare did quake."[354]

He develops all the ideas which he handles. All his phrases become periods. Instead of compressing, he expands. To bear this ample thought and its accompanying train, he requires a long stanza, ever renewed, long alternate verses, reiterated rhymes, whose uniformity and fullness recall the majestic sounds which undulate eternally through the woods and the fields. To unfold these epic faculties, and to display them in the sublime region where his soul is naturally borne, he requires an ideal stage, situated beyond the bounds of reality, with personages who could hardly exist, and in a world which could never be.

He made many miscellaneous attempts in sonnets, elegies, pastorals, hymns of love, little sparkling word-pictures;[355] they were but essays, incapable for the most part of supporting his genius. Yet already his magnificent imagination appeared in them; gods, men, landscapes, the world which he sets in motion is a thousand miles from that in which we live. His "Shepherd's Calendar"[356] is a thought-inspiring and tender pastoral, full of delicate loves, noble sorrows, lofty ideas, where no voice is heard but of thinkers and poets. His "Visions of Petrarch and Du Bellay" are admirable dreams, in which palaces, temples of gold, splendid landscapes, sparkling rivers, marvellous birds, appear in close succession as in an Oriental fairy-tale. If he sings a "Prothalamion," he sees two beautiful swans, white as snow, who come softly swimming down amidst the songs of nymphs and vermeil roses, while the transparent water kisses their silken feathers, and murmurs with joy:

"There, in a meadow, by the river's side, A flocke of Nymphes I chaunced to espy, All lovely daughters of the Flood thereby, With goodly greenish locks, all loose untyde, As each had bene a bryde; And each one had a little wicker basket, Made of fine twigs, entrayled curiously, In which they gathered flowers to fill their flasket, And with fine fingers cropt full feateously The tender stalkes on hye. Of every sort, which in that meadow grew, They gathered some; the violet, pallid blew, The little dazie, that at evening closes, The virgin lillie, and the primrose trew, With store of vermeil roses, To deck their bridegroomes posies Against the brydale-day, which was not long: Sweet Themmes! runne softly, till I end my song. "With that I saw two Swannes of goodly hewe Come softly swimming downe along the lee; Two fairer birds I yet did never see; The snow, which doth the top of Pindus strew, Did never whiter shew... So purely white they were, That even the gentle stream, the which them bare, Seem'd foule to them, and bad his billowes spare To wet their silken feathers, least they might Soyle their fayre plumes with water not so fayre, And marre their beauties bright, That shone as heavens light, Against their brydale day, which was not long: Sweet Themmes! runne softly, till I end my song!"[357]

If he bewails the death of Sidney, Sidney becomes a shepherd, he is slain like Adonis; around him gather weeping nymphs:

"The gods, which all things see, this same beheld, And, pittying this paire of lovers trew, Transformed them there lying on the field, Into one flowre that is both red and blew: It first growes red, and then to blew doth fade, Like Astrophel, which thereinto was made. "And in the midst thereof a star appeares, As fairly formd as any star in skyes: Resembling Stella in her freshest yeares, Forth darting beames of beautie from her eyes; And all the day it standeth full of deow, Which is the teares, that from her eyes did flow."[358]

His most genuine sentiments become thus fairy-like. Magic is the mould of his mind, and impresses its shape on all that he imagines or thinks. Involuntarily he robs objects of their ordinary form. If he looks at a landscape, after an instant he sees it quite differently. He carries it, unconsciously, into an enchanted land; the azure heaven sparkles like a canopy of diamonds, meadows are clothed with flowers, a biped population flutters in the balmy air, palaces of jasper shine among the trees, radiant ladies appear on carved balconies above galleries of emerald. This unconscious toil of mind is like the slow crystallizations of nature. A moist twig is cast into the bottom of a mine, and is brought out again a hoop of diamonds.

At last he finds a subject which suits him, the greatest joy permitted to an artist. He removes his epic from the common ground which, in the hands of Homer and Dante, gave expression to a living creed, and depicted national heroes. He leads us to the summit of fairy-land, soaring above history, on that extreme verge where objects vanish and pure idealism begins: "I have undertaken a work," he says, "to represent all the moral virtues, assigning to every virtue a knight to be the patron and defender of the same; in whose actions and feats of armes and chivalry the operations of that vertue, whereof he is the protector, are to be expressed, and the vices and unruly appetites that oppose themselves against the same, to be beaten downe and overcome."[359] In fact he gives us an allegory as the foundation of his poem, not that he dreams of becoming a wit, a preacher of moralities, a propounder of riddles. He does not subordinate image to idea; he is a seer, not a philosopher. They are living men and actions which he sets in motion; only from time to time, in his poem, enchanted palaces, a whole train of splendid visions trembles and divides like a mist, enabling us to catch a glimpse of the thought which raised and arranged it. When in his Garden of Adonis we see the countless forms of all living things arranged in due order, in close compass, awaiting life, we conceive with him the birth of universal love, the ceaseless fertility of the great mother, the mysterious swarm of creatures which rise in succession from her "wide wombe of the world." When we see his Knight of the Cross combating with a horrible woman-serpent in defence of his beloved lady Una, we dimly remember that, if we search beyond these two figures, we shall find behind one, Truth, behind the other, Falsehood. We perceive that his characters are not flesh and blood, and that all these brilliant phantoms are phantoms, and nothing more. We take pleasure in their brilliancy, without believing in their substantiality; we are interested in their doings, without troubling ourselves about their misfortunes. We know that their tears and cries are not real. Our emotion is purified and raised. We do not fall into gross illusion; we have that gentle feeling of knowing ourselves to be dreaming. We, like him, are a thousand leagues from actual life, beyond the pangs of painful pity, unmixed terror, violent and bitter hatred. We entertain only refined sentiments, partly formed, arrested at the very moment they were about to affect us with too sharp a stroke. They slightly touch us, and we find ourselves happy in being extricated from a belief which was beginning to be oppressive.

SECTION VII.—Spenser in his Relation to the Renaissance

What world could furnish materials to so elevated a fancy? One only, that of chivalry; for none is so far from the actual. Alone and independent in his castle, freed from all the ties which society, family, toil, usually impose on the actions of men, the feudal hero had attempted every kind of adventure, but yet he had done less than he imagined; the boldness of his deeds had been exceeded by the madness of his dreams. For want of useful employment and an accepted rule, his brain had labored on an unreasoning and impossible track, and the urgency of his wearisomeness had increased beyond measure his craving for excitement. Under this stimulus his poetry had become a world of imagery. Insensibly strange conceptions had grown and multiplied in his brains, one over the other, like ivy woven round a tree, and the original trunk had disappeared beneath their rank growth and their obstruction. The delicate fancies of the old Welsh poetry, the grand ruins of the German epics, the marvellous splendors of the conquered East, all the recollections which four centuries of adventure had scattered among the minds of men, had become gathered into one great dream; and giants, dwarfs, monsters, the whole medley of imaginary creatures, of superhuman exploits and splendid follies, were grouped around a unique conception, exalted and sublime love, like courtiers prostrated at the feet of their king. It was an ample and buoyant subject-matter, from which the great artists of the age, Ariosto, Tasso, Cervantes, Rabelais, had hewn their poems. But they belonged too completely to their own time, to admit of their belonging to one which had passed.[360] They created a chivalry afresh, but it was not genuine. The ingenious Ariosto, an ironical epicurean, delights his gaze with it, and grows merry over it, like a man of pleasure, a sceptic who rejoices doubly in his pleasure because it is sweet, and because it is forbidden. By his side poor Tasso, inspired by a fanatical, revived, factitious Catholicism, amid the tinsel of an old school of poetry, works on the same subject, in sickly fashion, with great effort and scant success. Cervantes, himself a knight, albeit he loves chivalry for its nobleness, perceives its folly, and crushes it to the ground, with heavy blows, in the mishaps of the wayside inns. More coarsely, more openly, Rabelais, a rude commoner, drowns it with a burst of laughter, in his merriment and nastiness. Spenser alone takes it seriously and naturally. He is on the level of so much nobleness, dignity, reverie. He is not yet settled and shut in by that species of exact common-sense which was to found and cramp the whole modern civilization. In his heart he inhabits the poetic and shadowy land from which men were daily drawing farther and farther away. He is enamored of it, even to its very language; he revives the old words, the expressions of the Middle Ages, the style of Chaucer, especially in the "Shepherd's Calendar." He enters straightway upon the strangest dreams of the old story-tellers, without astonishment, like a man who has still stranger dreams of his own. Enchanted castles, monsters and giants, duels in the woods, wandering ladies, all spring up under his hands, the mediæval fancy with the mediaeval generosity; and it is just because this world is unreal that it so suits his humor.

Is there in chivalry sufficient to furnish him with matter? That is but one world, and he has another. Beyond the valiant men, the glorified images of moral virtues, he has the gods, finished models of sensible beauty; beyond Christian chivalry he has the pagan Olympus; beyond the idea of heroic will which can only be satisfied by adventures and danger, there exists calm energy, which, by its own impulse, is in harmony with actual existence. For such a poet one ideal is not enough; beside the beauty of effort he places the beauty of happiness; he couples them, not deliberately as a philosopher, nor with the design of a scholar like Goethe, but because they are both lovely; and here and there, amid armor and passages of arms, he distributes satyrs, nymphs, Diana, Venus, like Greek statues amid the turrets and lofty trees of an English park. There is nothing forced in the union; the ideal epic, like a superior heaven, receives and harmonizes the two worlds; a beautiful pagan dream carries on a beautiful dream of chivalry; the link consists in the fact that they are both beautiful. At this elevation the poet has ceased to observe the differences of races and civilizations. He can introduce into his picture whatever he will; his only reason is, "That suited"; and there could be no better. Under the glossy-leaved oaks, by the old trunk so deeply rooted in the ground, he can see two knights cleaving each other, and the next instant a company of Fauns who came there to dance. The beams of light which have poured down upon the velvet moss, the green turf of an English forest, can reveal the dishevelled locks and white shoulders of nymphs. Do we not see it in Rubens? And what signify discrepancies in the happy and sublime illusion of fancy? Are there more discrepancies? Who perceives them, who feels them? Who does not feel, on the contrary, that to speak the truth, there is but one world, that of Plato and the poets; that actual phenomena are but outlines—mutilated, incomplete and blurred outlines—wretched abortions scattered here and there on Time's track, like fragments of clay, half moulded, then cast aside, lying in an artist's studio; that, after all, invisible forces and ideas, which forever renew the actual existences, attain their fulfilment only in imaginary existences; and that the poet, in order to express nature in its entirety, is obliged to embrace in his sympathy all the ideal forms by which nature reveals itself? This is the greatness of his work; he has succeeded in seizing beauty in its fulness, because he cared for nothing but beauty.

The reader will feel that it is impossible to give in full the plot of such a poem. In fact, there are six poems, each of a dozen cantos, in which the action is ever diverging and converging again, becoming confused and starting again; and all the imaginings of antiquity and of the Middle Ages are, I believe, combined in it. The knight "pricks along the plaine," among the trees, and at a crossing of the paths meets other knights with whom he engages in combat; suddenly from within a cave appears a monster, half woman and half serpent, surrounded by a hideous offspring; further on a giant, with three bodies; then a dragon, great as a hill, with sharp talons and vast wings. For three days he fights them, and twice overthrown, he comes to himself only by aid of "a gracious ointment." After that there are savage tribes to be conquered, castles surrounded by flames to be taken. Meanwhile ladies are wandering in the midst of forests, on white palfreys, exposed to the assaults of miscreants, now guarded by a lion which follows them, now delivered by a band of satyrs who adore them. Magicians work manifold charms; palaces display their festivities; tilt-yards provide endless tournaments; sea-gods, nymphs, fairies, kings, intermingle in these feasts, surprises, dangers.

You will say it is a phantasmagoria. What matter, if we see it? And we do see it, for Spenser does. His sincerity communicates itself to us. He is so much at home in this world that we end by finding ourselves at home in it too. He shows no appearance of astonishment at astonishing events; he comes upon them so naturally that he makes them natural; he defeats the miscreants, as if he had done nothing else all his life. Venus, Diana, and the old deities, dwell at his gate and enter his threshold without his taking any heed of them. His serenity becomes ours. We grow credulous and happy by contagion, and to the same extent as he. How could it be otherwise? Is it possible to refuse credence to a man who paints things for us with such accurate details and in such lively colors? Here with a dash of his pen he describes a forest for you; and are you not instantly in it with him Beech trees with their silvery stems, "loftie trees iclad with sommers pride, did spred so broad, that heavens light did hide"; rays of light tremble on the bark and shine on the ground, on the reddening ferns and low bushes, which, suddenly smitten with the luminous track, glisten and glimmer. Footsteps are scarcely heard on the thick beds of heaped leaves; and at distant intervals, on the tall herbage, drops of dew are sparkling. Yet the sound of a horn reaches us through the foliage; how sweetly yet cheerfully it falls on the ear, amidst this vast silence! It resounds more loudly; the clatter of a hunt draws near; "eft through the thicke they heard one rudely rush;" a nymph approaches, the most chaste and beautiful in the world. Spenser sees her; nay more, he kneels before her:

"Her face so faire, as flesh it seemed not, But hevenly pourtraict of bright angels hew, Cleare as the skye, withouten blame or blot, Through goodly mixture of complexions dew; And in her cheekes the vermeill red did shew Like roses in a bed of lillies shed, The which ambrosiall odours from them threw, And gazers sence with double pleasure fed, Hable to heale the sicke and to revive the ded. "In her faire eyes two living lamps did flame, Kindled above at th' Hevenly Makers light, And darted fyrie beames out of the same; So passing persant, and so wondrous bright, That quite bereav'd the rash beholders sight: In them the blinded god his lustfull fyre To kindle oft assayd, but had no might; For, with dredd maiestie and awfull yre, She broke his wanton darts, and quenched bace desyre. "Her yvorie forhead, full of bountie brave, Like a broad table did itselfe dispred, For Love his loftie triumphes to engrave, And write the battailes of his great godhed: All good and honour might therein be red; For there their dwelling was. And, when she spake Sweete wordes, like dropping honny, she did shed; And 'twixt the perles and rubins softly brake A silver sound, that heavenly musicke seemd to make. "Upon her eyelids many Graces sate, Under the shadow of her even browes, Working belgardes and amorous retrate; And everie one her with a grace endowes, And everie one with meekenesse to her bowes: So glorious mirrhour of celestiall grace, And soveraine moniment of mortall vowes, How shall frayle pen descrive her heavenly face, For feare, through want of skill, her beauty to disgrace. "So faire, and thousand thousand times more faire, She seemd, when she presented was to sight; And was yclad, for heat of scorching aire, All in a silken Camus lilly whight, Purfled upon with many a folded plight, Which all above besprinckled was throughout With golden aygulets, that glistred bright, Like twinckling starres; and all the skirt about Was hemd with golden fringe. "Below her ham her weed did somewhat trayne, And her streight legs most bravely were embayld In gilden buskins of costly cordwayne, All bard with golden bendes, which were entayld With curious antickes, and full fayre aumayld. Before, they fastned were under her knee In a rich iewell, and therein entrayld The ends of all the knots, that none might see How they within their fouldings close enwrapped bee. "Like two faire marble pillours they were seene, Which doe the temple of the gods support, Whom all the people decke with girlands greene, And honour in their festivall resort; Those same with stately grace and princely port She taught to tread, when she herselfe would grace; But with the woody nymphes when she did play, Or when the flying libbard she did chace, She could them nimbly move, and after fly apace. "And in her hand a sharpe bore-speare she held, And at her backe a bow and quiver gay, Stuft with steel-headed dartes wherewith she queld The salvage beastes in her victorious play, Knit with a golden bauldricke which forelay Athwart her snowy brest, and did divide Her daintie paps; which, like young fruit in May, Now little gan to swell, and being tide Through her thin weed their places only signifide. "Her yellow lockes, crisped like golden wyre, About her shoulders weren loosely shed, And, when the winde emongst them did inspyre, They waved like a penon wyde dispred And low behinde her backe were scattered: And, whether art it were or heedlesse hap, As through the flouring forrest rash she fled, In her rude heares sweet flowres themselves did lap, And flourishing fresh leaves and blossomes did enwrap."[361] "The daintie rose, the daughter of her morne, More deare than life she tendered, whose flowre The girlond of her honour did adorne; Ne suffered she the middayes scorching powre. Ne the sharp northerne wind thereon to showre; But lapped up her silken leaves most chayre, Whenso the froward skye began to lowre; But, soone as calmed was the cristall ayre, She did it fayre dispred, and let to flourish fayre."[362]

He is on his knees before her, I repeat, as a child on Corpus Christi day, among flowers and perfumes, transported with admiration, so that he sees a heavenly light in her eyes, and angel's tints on her cheeks, even impressing into her service Christian angels and pagan graces to adorn and await upon her; it is love which brings such visions before him:

"Sweet love, that doth his golden wings embay In blessed nectar and pure pleasures well."

Whence this perfect beauty, this modest and charming dawn, in which he assembles all the brightness, all the sweetness, all the virgin graces of the full morning? What mother begat her, what marvellous birth brought to light such a wonder of grace and purity? One day, in a sparkling, solitary fountain, where the sunbeams shone, Chrysogone was bathing with roses and violets.

"It was upon a sommers shinie day, When Titan faire his beamës did display, In a fresh fountaine, far from all mens vew, She bath'd her brest the boyling heat t' allay; She bath'd with roses red and violets blew, And all the sweetest flowers that in the forrest grew. Till faint through yrkesome wearines adowne Upon the grassy ground herselfe she layd To sleepe, the whiles a gentle slombring swowne Upon her fell all naked bare displayd."[363]

The beams played upon her body, and "fructified" her. The months rolled on. Troubled and ashamed, she went into the "wildernesse," and sat down, "every sence with sorrow sore opprest." Meanwhile Venus, searching for her boy Cupid, who had mutinied and fled from her, "wandered in the world." She had sought him in courts, cities, cottages, promising "kisses sweet, and sweeter things, unto the man that of him tydings to her brings."

"Shortly unto the wastefull woods she came, Whereas she found the goddesse (Diana) with her crew, After late chace of their embrewed game, Sitting beside a fountaine in a rew; Some of them washing with the liquid dew From off their dainty limbs the dusty sweat And soyle, which did deforme their lively hew; Others lay shaded from the scorching heat, The rest upon her person gave attendance great. She, having hong upon a bough on high Her bow and painted quiver, had unlaste Her silver buskins from her nimble thigh, And her lanck loynes ungirt, and brests unbraste, After her heat the breathing cold to taste; Her golden lockes, that late in tresses bright Embreaded were for hindring of her haste, Now loose about her shoulders hong undight, And were with sweet Ambrosia all besprinckled light."[364]