"
But whatever may have been Spenser's religious opinions (which do not
nearly concern us here), the bent of his mind was toward a Platonic
mysticism, a supramundane sphere where it could shape universal forms out
of the primal elements of things, instead of being forced to put up with
their fortuitous combinations in the unwilling material of mortal clay.
He who, when his singing robes were on, could never be tempted nearer to
the real world than under some subterfuge of pastoral or allegory,
expatiates joyously in this untrammelled ether:--
"Lifting himself out of the lowly dust
On golden plumes up to the purest sky."
Nowhere does his genius soar and sing with such continuous aspiration,
nowhere is his phrase so decorously stately, though rising to an
enthusiasm which reaches intensity while it stops short of vehemence, as
in his Hymns to Love and Beauty, especially the latter. There is an
exulting spurn of earth in it, as of a soul just loosed from its cage. I
shall make no extracts from it, for it is one of those intimately
coherent and transcendentally logical poems that "moveth altogether if it
move at all," the breaking off a fragment from which would maim it as it
would a perfect group of crystals. Whatever there is of sentiment and
passion is for the most part purely disembodied and without sex, like
that of angels,--a kind of poetry which has of late gone out of fashion,
whether to our gain or not may be questioned.
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