"What more felicity can fall to creature
Than to enjoy delight with liberty,
And to be lord of all the works of nature?
To reign in the air from earth to highest sky,
To feed on flowers and weeds of glorious feature,
To take whatever thing doth please the eye?
Who rests not pleased with such happiness,
Well worthy he to taste of wretchedness."
The "Muiopotmos" pleases us all the more that it vibrates in us a string
of classical association by adding an episode to Ovid's story of Arachne.
"Talking the other day with a friend (the late Mr. Keats) about Dante, he
observed that whenever so great a poet told us anything in addition or
continuation of an ancient story, he had a right to be regarded as
classical authority. For instance, said he, when he tells us of that
characteristic death of Ulysses, ... we ought to receive the information
as authentic, and be glad that we have more news of Ulysses than we
looked for."[290]
We can hardly doubt that Ovid would have been glad to admit this
exquisitely fantastic illumination into his margin.
No German analyzer of aesthetics has given us so convincing a definition
of the artistic nature as these radiant verses. "To reign in the air" was
certainly Spenser's function. And yet the commentators, who seem never
willing to let their poet be a poet pure and simple, though, had he not
been so, they would have lost their only hold upon life, try to make out
from his "Mother Hubberd's Tale" that he might have been a very sensible
matter of-fact man if he would.
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