ii. 44:--
"'Now hath fair Phoebe with her silver face
Thrice seen the shadows of this nether world,
Sith last I left that honorable place,
In which her royal presence is enrolled.'
"That is, it is three months since I left her palace."[306] But Dr. Warton
should have remembered (what he too often forgets in his own verses)
that, in spite of Dr. Johnson's dictum, poetry is not prose, and that
verse only loses its advantage over the latter by invading its
province.[307] Verse itself is an absurdity except as an expression of
some higher movement of the mind, or as an expedient to lift other minds
to the same ideal level. It is the cothurnus which gives language an
heroic stature. I have said that one leading characteristic of Spenser's
style was its spaciousness, that he habitually dilates rather than
compresses. But his way of measuring time was perfectly natural in an age
when everybody did not carry a dial in his poke as now. He is the last of
the poets, who went (without affectation) by the great clock of the
firmament. Dante, the miser of words, who goes by the same timepiece, is
full of these roundabout ways of telling us the hour. It had nothing to
do with Spenser's stanza, and I for one should be sorry to lose these
stately revolutions of the _superne ruote_.
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