SPENSER,
Was not less an exemplar of diligence than of skill in the architecture of verse. The mere task-work of constructing three thousand eight hundred and fifty-four stanzas, comprising forty-four thousand six hundred and sixty-eight lines, would have wearied out the industry of any mind whose powers were not indefatigable. He died, too, before his magnificent design was complete, or the elaborate monument of his fame might have been still more colossal. Superiority to mental indolence, so manifest in the lives of Shakspeare and Spenser, is equally noticeable in the cases of Chaucer and Milton, of Ben Jonson and Beaumont and Fletcher, of Dryden and Pope, of Byron and Wordsworth, our other great poets; and, indeed, in the histories of the great poets of all nations. When the quantity of their composition is considered, and it is remembered how much thought must have been expended in the bringing together of choice materials, how much care in the polishing and adorning of each part, and of the whole, of their seemly fabrics, the degree of perseverance exercised in the erection of so many immortal superstructures of the mind is presented to reflection with commanding self-evidence. But let us track, more circumstantially, the life-path, so proverbial for vicissitude, of some of the children of genius, that we may see how the energy of true men is neither quelled by difficulty nor enervated by success.