His immediate
predecessors seem to have conceived of it as a kind of bird of paradise,
born to float somewhere between heaven and earth, with no very well
defined relation to either. It is true that the nearest approach they
were able to make to this airy ideal was a shuttlecock, winged with a
bright plume or so from Italy, but, after all, nothing but cork and
feathers, which they bandied back and forth from one stanza to another,
with the useful ambition of _keeping it up_ as long as they could. To my
mind the old comedy of "Gammer Gurton's Needle" is worth the whole of
them. It may be coarse, earthy, but in reading it one feels that he is at
least a man among men, and not a humbug among humbugs.
The form of Spenser's "Shepherd's Calendar," it is true, is artificial,
absurdly so if you look at it merely from the outside,--not, perhaps, the
wisest way to look at anything, unless it be a jail or a volume of the
"Congressional Globe,"--but the spirit of it is fresh and original We
have at last got over the superstition that shepherds and shepherdesses
are any wiser or simpler than other people. We know that wisdom can be on
only by wide commerce with men and books, and that simplicity, whether of
manners or style, is the crowning result of the highest culture. But the
pastorals of Spenser were very different things, different both in the
moving spirit and the resultant form from the later ones of Browne or the
"Piscatory Eclogues" of Phinehas Fletcher.
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