132-135; Ib., XXVII. 110.
SPENSER.
Chaucer had been in his grave one hundred and fifty years ere England had
secreted choice material enough for the making of another great poet. The
nature of men living together in societies, as of the individual man,
seems to have its periodic ebbs and floods, its oscillations between the
ideal and the matter-of-fact, so that the doubtful boundary line of shore
between them is in one generation a hard sandy actuality strewn only with
such remembrances of beauty as a dead sea-moss here and there, and in the
next is whelmed with those lacelike curves of ever-gaining, ever-receding
foam, and that dance of joyous spray which for a moment catches and holds
the sunshine.
From the two centuries between 1400 and 1600 the indefatigable Ritson in
his _Bibliographia Poetica_ has made us a catalogue of some six hundred
English poets, or, more properly, verse-makers. Ninety-nine in a hundred
of them are mere names, most of them no more than shadows of names, some
of them mere initials. Nor can it be said of them that their works have
perished because they were written in an obsolete dialect; for it is the
poem that keeps the language alive, and not the language that buoys up
the poem. The revival of letters, as it is called, was at first the
revival of _ancient_ letters, which, while it made men pedants, could do
very little toward making them poets, much less toward making them
original writers.
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