"[302]
Spenser, at his best, has come as near to expressing this unattainable
something as any other poet. He is so purely poet that with him the
meaning does not so often modulate the music of the verse as the music
makes great part of the meaning and leads the thought along its pleasant
paths. No poet is so splendidly superfluous as he; none knows so well
that in poetry enough is not only not so good as a feast, but is a
beggarly parsimony. He spends himself in a careless abundance only to be
justified by incomes of immortal youth.
"Pensier canuto ne molto ne poco
Si puo quivi albergare in alcun cuore;
Non entra quivi disagio ne inopia,
Ma vi sta ogn'or col corno pien la Copia."[303]
This delicious abundance and overrunning luxury of Spenser appear in the
very structure of his verse. He found the _ottava rima_ too monotonously
iterative; so, by changing the order of his rhymes, he shifted the let
from the end of the stave, where it always seems to put on the brakes
with a jar, to the middle, where it may serve at will as a brace or a
bridge; he found it not roomy enough, so first ran it over into another
line, and then ran that added line over into an alexandrine, in which the
melody of one stanza seems forever longing and feeling forward after that
which is to follow.
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