" We have seen
that Spenser, under the misleading influence of Sidney[282] and Harvey,
tried his hand at English hexameters. But his great glory is that he
taught his own language to sing and move to measures harmonious and
noble. Chaucer had done much to vocalize it, as I have tried to show
elsewhere,[283] but Spenser was to prove
"That no tongue hath the muse's utterance heired
For verse, and that sweet music to the ear
Struck out of rhyme, so naturally as this."
The "Shepherd's Calendar" contains perhaps the most picturesquely
imaginative verse which Spenser has written. It is in the eclogue for
February, where he tells us of the
"Faded oak
Whose body is sere, whose branches broke,
Whose naked arms stretch unto the fire."
It is one of those verses that Joseph Warton would have liked in secret,
that Dr. Johnson would have proved to be untranslatable into reasonable
prose, and which the imagination welcomes at once without caring whether
it be exactly conformable to _barbara_ or _celarent_. Another pretty
verse in the same eclogue,
"But gently took that ungently came,"
pleased Coleridge so greatly that he thought it was his own. But in
general it is not so much the sentiments and images that are new as the
modulation of the verses in which they float.
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