Then whatever
is imperishable in us recognizes for an instant and claims kindred with
something outside and distinct from it, yet in some inconceivable way a
part of it, that flashes back on it an ideal beauty which impoverishes
all other companionship. This exaltation with which love sometimes
subtilizes the nerves of coarsest men so that they feel and see, not the
thing as it seems to others, but the beauty of it, the joy of it, the
soul of eternal youth that is in it, would appear to have been the normal
condition of Spenser. While the senses of most men live in the cellar,
his "were laid in a large upper chamber which opened toward the
sunrising."
"His birth was of the womb of morning dew,
And his conception of the joyous prime."
The very greatest poets (and is there, after all, more than one of them?)
have a way, I admit, of getting within our inmost consciousness and in a
manner betraying us to ourselves. There is in Spenser a remoteness very
different from this, but it is also a seclusion, and quite as agreeable,
perhaps quite as wholesome in certain moods when we are glad to get away
from ourselves and those importunate trifles which we gravely call the
realities of life. In the warm Mediterranean of his mind everything
"Suffers a sea change
Into something rich and strange.
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