There is no ebb and flow in his metre more than on
the shores of the Adriatic, but wave follows wave with equable gainings
and recessions, the one sliding back in fluent music to be mingled with
and carried forward by the next. In all this there is soothingness
indeed, but no slumberous monotony; for Spenser was no mere metrist, but
a great composer. By the variety of his pauses--now at the close of the
first or second foot, now of the third, and again of the fourth--he gives
spirit and energy to a measure whose tendency it certainly is to become
languorous. He knew how to make it rapid and passionate at need, as in
such verses as,
"But he, my lion, and my noble lord,
How does he find in cruel heart to hate
Her that him loved and ever most adored
As the God of my life? Why hath he me abhorred?"[304]
or this,
"Come hither, come hither, O, come hastily!"[305]
Joseph Warton objects to Spenser's stanza, that its "constraint led him
into many absurdities." Of these he instances three, of which I shall
notice only one, since the two others (which suppose him at a loss for
words and rhymes) will hardly seem valid to any one who knows the poet.
It is that it "obliged him to dilate the thing to be expressed, however
unimportant with trifling and tedious circumlocutions, namely, Faery
Queen, II.
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