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Stamford, Conn. (Connecticut, United States) (search for this): chapter 2
short in speech, when it shall be read long in verse, seemeth like a lame gosling that draweth one leg after her; and Heaven being used short as one syllable, when it is in verse stretched out with a diastole, is like a lame dog that holds up one leg. Nash, who has far better claims than Swift to be called the English Rabelais, thus at once describes and parodies Harvey's hexameters in prose, that drunken, staggering kind of verse, which is all up hill and down hill, like the way betwixt Stamford and Beechfield, and goes like a horse plunging through the mire in the deep of winter, now soused up to the saddle, and straight aloft on his tiptoes. It was a happy thought to satirize (in this inverted way) prose written in the form of verse. It is almost inconceivable that Spenser's hexameters should have been written by the man who was so soon to teach his native language how to soar and sing, and to give a fuller sail to English verse. One of the most striking facts in our literary
Sydney (Ohio, United States) (search for this): chapter 2
hepherd's Calendar as well as in the Faery Queen. We have seen that Spenser, under the misleading influence of Sidney It was at Penshurst that he wrote the only specimen that has come down to us, and bad enough it is. I have said that some of Sidney's are pleasing. and Harvey, tried his hand at English hexameters. But his great glory is that he taught his own language to sing and move to measures harmonious and noble. Chaucer had done much to vocalize it, as I have tried to show elsewhere, there any passage in any poet that so ripples and sparkles with simple delight as this? It is a sky of Italian April full of sunshine and the hidden ecstasy of larks. And we like it all the more that it reminds us of that passage in his friend Sidney's Arcadia, where the shepherd-boy pipes as if he would never be old. If we compare it with the mystical scene in Dante, Purgatorio, XXIX., XXX. of which it is a reminiscence, it will seem almost like a bit of real life; but taken by itself it
Cumberland (United Kingdom) (search for this): chapter 2
measure. I have italicized his second thought, which chimes curiously with the feeling Daniel leaves in the mind. (See Haslewood's Ancient Crit. Essays, Vol. II.) Wordsworth, an excellent judge, much admired Daniel's poem to the Countess of Cumberland. Writing two hundred and fifty years ago, he stands in no need of a glossary, and I have noted scarce a dozen words, and not more turns of phrase, in his works, that have become obsolete. This certainly indicates both remarkable taste and equaer kinds of poetry, but leaves you, as it were, upon the bank watching the peaceful current and lulled by its somewhat monotonous murmur. His best-known poem, blunderingly misprinted in all the collections, is that addressed to the Countess of Cumberland. It is an amplification of Horace's Integer Vitoe, and when we compare it with the original we miss the point, the compactness, and above all the urbane tone of the original. It is very fine English, but it is the English of diplomacy somehow
Venice (Italy) (search for this): chapter 2
es. In this last quality Ariosto, whose emulous pupil he was, is as Bologna to Venice in the comparison. That, when the personal allusions have lost their meaning aten our perceptions, not so long as to cloy them. He makes one think always of Venice; for not only is his style Venetian, Was not this picture painted by Paul VeVenetian, Was not this picture painted by Paul Veronese, for example? Arachne figured how Jove did abuse Europa like a bull, and on his back Her through the sea did bear:. . . . She seemed still back unto the laner begins a complimentary sonnet prefixed to the Commonwealth and Government of Venice (1599) with this beautiful verse, Fair Venice, flower of the last world's dVenice, flower of the last world's delight. Perhaps we should read lost? but as the gallery there is housed in the shell of an abandoned convent, so his in that of a deserted allegory. And again, as at Venice you swim in a gondola from Gian Bellini to Titian, and from Titian to Tintoret, so in him, where other cheer is wanting, the gentle sway of his measure,
Endicott (search for this): chapter 2
k he sympathized to the last. His rebukes of clerical worldliness are in the Puritan tone, and as severe a one as any is in Mother Hubberd's Tale, published in 1591. Ben Jonson told Drummond that in that paper Sir W. Raleigh had of the allegories of his Faery Queen, by the Blatant Beast the Puritans were understood. But this is certainly wrong. There were very different shades of Puritanism, according to individual temperament. That of Winthrop and Higginson had a mellowness of which Endicott and Standish were incapable. The gradual change of Milton's opinions was similar to that which I suppose in Spenser. The passage in Mother Hubberd may have been aimed at the Protestant clergy of Ireland (for he says much the same thing in his View of the State of Ireland), but it is general in its terms. There is an iconoclastic relish in his account of Sir Guyon's demolishing the Bower of Bliss that makes us think he would not have regretted the plundered abbeys as perhaps Shakespeare di
Helicon (search for this): chapter 2
, was to wonder, like M. Jourdain, that he had been talking prose all his life,—but already he gave clear indications of the tendency and premonitions of the power which were to carry it forward to ultimate perfection. A harmony and alacrity of language like this were unexampled in English verse:— Ye dainty nymphs, that in this blessed brook Do bathe your breast, Forsake your watery bowers and hither look At my request. . . . . And eke you virgins that on Parnass dwell, Whence floweth Helicon, the learned well, Help me to blaze Her worthy praise, Which in her sex doth all excel. Here we have the natural gait of the measure, somewhat formal and slow, as befits an invocation; and now mark how the same feet shall be made to quicken their pace at the bidding of the tune:— Bring here the pink and purple columbine, With gilliflowers; Bring coronations and sops in wine, Worne of paramours; Strow me the ground with daffadowndillies, And cowslips and kingcups and loved lilies; The <
Theseus (search for this): chapter 2
d dancing in delight. All they without were ranged in a ring, And danced round; but in the midst of them Three other ladies did both dance and sing, The while the rest them round about did hem, And like a garland did in compass stem. And in the midst of these same three was placed Another damsel, as a precious gem Amidst a ring most richly well enchased, That with her goodly presence all the rest much graced. Look how the crown which Ariadne wove Upon her ivory forehead that same day, That Theseus her unto his bridal bore, (When the bold Centaurs made that bloody fray, With the fierce Lapithes, that did them dismay) Being now placed in the firmament, Through the bright heaven doth her beams display, And is unto the stars an ornament, Which round about her move in order excellent; Such was the beauty of this goodly band, Whose sundry parts were here too long to tell, But she that in the midst of them did stand, Seemed all the rest in beauty to excel, Crowned with a rosy garland that r
John Milton (search for this): chapter 2
more light-armed and modern than the prose of Milton fifty years later. For us Occidentals he has self and Virgil. He called Chaucer master, as Milton was afterwards to call him. And, even while hend reminds one of the long-breathed periods of Milton. Drummond of Hawthornden tells us, he [Ben Jof his style. He was letting his wings grow, as Milton said, and foreboding the Faery Queen:— Li been unusual, but in the first half of them. Milton contrives a break (a kind of heave, as it wereplural form. But he was, with the exception of Milton and possibly Gray, the most learned of our poe highest vocation of all, that of teacher, and Milton calls him our sage and serious poet, whom I dats, the most truly sensuous, using the word as Milton probably meant it when he said that poetry sho that last verse. And here is a passage which Milton had read and remembered:— And is there cariter of English verse. I need say nothing of Milton, nor of professed disciples like Browne, the t[1 more...]<
Drayton (search for this): chapter 2
e the Faery Queen two long poems were printed and popular,— the Mirror for Magistrates and Warner's Albion's England,—and not long after it came the Polyolbion of Drayton and the Civil Wars of Daniel. This was the period of the saurians in English poetry, interminable poems, book after book and canto after canto, like far-stretchi hard work. Fathers when their day on earth was up must have folded down the leaf and left the task to be finished by their sons,—a dreary inheritance. Yet both Drayton and Daniel are fine poets, though both of them in their most elaborate works made shipwreck of their genius on the shoal of a bad subject. Neither of them could lexandrines! Even the laborious Selden, who wrote annotations on it, sometimes more entertaining than the text, gave out at the end of the eighteenth book. Yet Drayton could write well, and had an agreeable lightsomeness of fancy, as his Nymphidia proves. His poem To the Cambro-Britons on their Harp is full of vigor; it runs, i<
Phoebus (search for this): chapter 2
lin. In Milton's Lycidas there are reminiscences of this eclogue as well as of that for May. The latter are the more evident, but I think that Spenser's Cuddie, the praise is better than the price, suggested Milton's But not the praise, Phoebus replied, and touched my trembling ears. Shakespeare had read and remembered this pastoral. Compare But, ah, Mecaenas is yclad in clay, And great Augustus long ago is dead, And all the worthies liggen wrapt in lead, with King Pandion, heeam behind the steadfast star That was in ocean's waves yet never wet, But firm is fixt and sendeth light from far To all that in the wide deep wandering are; or this? At last the golden oriental gate Of greatest heaven gan to open fair, And Phoebus, fresh as bridegroom to his mate, Came dancing forth, shaking his dewy hair And hurls his glistening beams through dewy air. The generous indefiniteness, which treats an hour more or less as of no account, is in keeping with that sense of endles
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