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Their groves he felled, their gardens did deface,
Their arbors spoil, their cabinets suppress,
Their banquet-houses burn, their buildings rase,
And of the fairest late now made the foulest place.
But whatever may have been
Spenser's religious opinions (which do not nearly concern us here), the bent of his mind was toward a Platonic mysticism, a supramundane sphere where it could shape universal forms out of the primal elements of things, instead of being forced to put up with their fortuitous combinations in the unwilling material of mortal clay.
He who, when his singing robes were on, could never be tempted nearer to the real world than under some subterfuge of pastoral or allegory, expatiates joyously in this untrammelled ether:—
Lifting himself out of the lowly dust
On golden plumes up to the purest sky.
Nowhere does his genius soar and sing with such continuous aspiration, nowhere is his phrase so decorously stately, though rising to an enthusiasm which reaches intensity while it stops short of vehemence, as in his Hymns to Love and Beauty, especially the latter.
There is an exulting spurn of earth in it, as of a soul just loosed from its cage.
I shall make no extracts from it, for it is one of those intimately coherent and transcendentally logical poems that ‘moveth altogether if it move at all,’ the breaking off a fragment from which would maim it as it would a perfect group of crystals.
Whatever there is of sentiment and passion is for the most part purely disembodied and without sex, like that of angels,—a kind of poetry which has of late gone out of fashion, whether to our gain or not may be questioned.
Perhaps one may venture to hint that the animal instincts are those that stand in least need of stimulation.
Spenser's notions of love were so nobly pure, so far from those of our common ancestor who could hang by his tail, as not
