To spend, to give, to want, to be undone."
The minor poems of Spenser beside the "Astrophel," are the "Epithalamium" on his own marriage; four "Hymns to Love and Beauty;" "Sonnets;" "Colin Clout come Home again;" "The Tears of the Muses;" "Mother Hubbard's Tales," which refer to Court characters of the time; "The Ruins of Time;" "Petrarch's Visions," "Bellaye's Visions," &c. In all these there is much beauty and fancy, mingled with much that is far-fetched and fantastic—the inevitable fault of that age. The "Faerie Queene" rises above them all as the cathedral over the lesser churches of a great city. It was written in a stanza which from him has ever since been called the Spenserian, a stanza so capable of every grace, strength, and harmony, that there are few poets who have not essayed it: Thomson's "Castle of Indolence," Beattie's "Minstrel," Mrs. Tighe's "Psyche," Campbell's "Gertrude of Wyoming," and Byron's "Childe Harold's Pilgrimage," have made it the vehicle of many immortal thoughts.
To the modern reader, nevertheless, the "Faerie Queene" would prove a tedious task in a continuous perusal. It is of a fashion and taste so entirely belonging to the age in which it was written—that of courtly tourneys, of parade of knighthood, at least in books, and of fondness of high-flown allegory—that it unavoidably strikes a reader of this more realistic age as visionary, formal in manner, and descriptive not of actual human life, but of an impossible style of existence. It is dedicated to Queen Elizabeth as "The Most High, Mightie, and Magnificent Empresse," and in a letter to Sir Walter Raleigh he explains its plan. Following the example of Ariosto in his "Orlando," he endeavours to exalt worthy knighthood by portraying Prince Arthur before he was king, under the image of a brave knight, perfected in the twelve private moral virtues, as Aristotle hath devised, in which is the purpose of these first twelve books. From the arguments of "Despair" to the "Red-Crosse Knight," we may take a specimen of the "Faerie Queene:"
"'Who travailes by the wearie, wandering way,
To come unto his wished home in haste,
And meets a flood that doth his passage stay,
Is not great grace to help him over past,
Or free his feet that in the myre sticke fast?
Most envious man that grieves at neighbour's good,
And fond, that joyest in the woe thou hast,