She seem’d—when she, presented was, to sight.
And was y-clad, for heat of scorching aire
All in a silken Camus, lilly white,
Purfled upon, with many a folded plight
Which all above besprinkled was throughout
With golden Aygulets, that glistered bright
Like twinckling starres, and all the skirt about
Was hemmed with golden fringe, …”
and so on, by dozens, by scores, by hundreds—delicate, mellifluous stanzas—fair ladies and brazen-scaled dragons, lions and fleecy lambs, sweet purling brooks and horrors of Pandemonium, story grafted upon story, and dreams grafted upon these, and still flowing on—canto after canto—until the worldlings are tempted to exclaim, “When will he stop?” It is an exclamation that a good many lesser men than Spenser have tempted—in class-rooms, in lecture-rooms, and in pulpits. And I am wicked enough to think that if a third had been shorn away by the poet from that over-full and over-epitheted poem of the Faery Queen, it would have reached farther, and come nearer to more minds and hearts. But who—save the master—shall ever put the shears into that dainty broidery where gorgeous flowers lie enmeshed in page-long tangles, and where wanton tendrils of words enlace and tie together whole platoons of verse?
In brief, the Poem is a great, cumbrous, beautiful, bewildering, meandering Allegory, in which he assigns to every Virtue a Knight to be ensampler and defender of the same, and puts these Knights to battle with all the vices represented by elfin hags, or scaled dragons, or beautiful women; and so the battles rage and the storms beat. But we lose sight of his moral in the smoke of the conflict. The skeleton of his ethics is overlaid with the wallets of fair flesh, and with splendid trappings; his abounding figures gallop away with the logic; his roses cumber all his corn-ground. There are no passages of condensed meaning, or of wondrous intuition that give one pause, and that stick by us like a burr. There is a symphonious clatter of hammers upon golden-headed tacks, but no such pounding blow as drives a big nail home.