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the thing.
Spenser needs no such extenuations.
No man can read the ‘Faery Queen’ and be anything but the better for it. Through that rude age, when Maids of Honor drank beer for breakfast and Hamlet could say a gross thing to Ophelia, he passes serenely abstracted and high, the Don Quixote of poets.
Whoever can endure unmixed delight, whoever can tolerate music and painting and poetry all in one, whoever wishes to be rid of thought and to let the busy anvils of the brain be silent for a time, let him read in the ‘Faery Queen.’
There is the land of pure heart's ease, where no ache or sorrow of spirit can enter.
Houghton, Mifflin and Company, Boston, 1876.
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