"[316]
In the Epithalamion there is an epithet which has been much admired for
its felicitous tenderness:--
"Behold, whiles she before the altar stands,
Hearing the holy priest that to her speakes
And blesseth her with his two _happy_ hands."
But the purely impersonal passion of the artist had already guided him to
this lucky phrase. It is addressed by Holiness--a dame surely as far
abstracted from the enthusiasms of love as we can readily conceive of--to
Una, who, like the visionary Helen of Dr. Faustus, has every charm of
womanhood, except that of being alive as Juliet and Beatrice are.
"O happy earth,
Whereon thy innocent feet do ever tread!"[317]
Can we conceive of Una, the fall of whose foot would be as soft as that
of a rose-leaf upon its mates already fallen,--can we conceive of her
treading anything so sordid? No; it is only on some unsubstantial floor
of dream that she walks securely, herself a dream. And it is only when
Spenser has escaped thither, only when this glamour of fancy has rarefied
his wife till she is grown almost as purely a creature of the imagination
as the other ideal images with which he converses, that his feeling
becomes as nearly passionate--as nearly human, I was on the point of
saying--as with him is possible.
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