The cold obstruction of two
centuries' thaws, and the stream of speech, once more let loose, seeks
out its old windings, or overflows musically in unpractised channels. The
service which Spenser did to our literature by this exquisite sense of
harmony is incalculable. His fine ear, abhorrent of barbarous dissonance,
his dainty tongue that loves to prolong the relish of a musical phrase,
made possible the transition from the cast-iron stiffness of "Ferrex and
Porrex" to the Damascus pliancy of Fletcher and Shakespeare. It was he
that
"Taught the dumb on high to sing,
And heavy ignorance aloft to fly
That added feathers to the learned's wing,
And gave to grace a double majesty."
I do not mean that in the "Shepherd's Calendar" he had already achieved
that transmutation of language and metre by which he was afterwards to
endow English verse with the most varied and majestic of stanzas, in
which the droning old alexandrine, awakened for the first time to a
feeling of the poetry that was in him, was to wonder, like M. Jourdain,
that he had been talking prose all his life,--but already he gave clear
indications of the tendency and premonitions of the power which were to
carry it forward to ultimate perfection. A harmony and alacrity of
language like this were unexampled in English verse:--
"Ye dainty nymphs, that in this blessed brook
Do bathe your breast,
Forsake your watery bowers and hither look
At my request.
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