What more felicity can fall a creature
Than to enjoy delight with liberty?
And to be lord of all the works of Nature,
To reign in the air from earth to highest sky?
To feed on flowers and weeds of glorious feature,
To take whatever thing doth please the eye?
Who rests not pleased with such happiness
Well worthy he to taste of wretchedness.
What poet has ever left us such a portrait of himself as this? In that butterfly Spenser has symbolized the purely poetical nature. It will be seen that there is no recognition of the moral sense whatever. The poetic nature considered abstractly craves only beauty and delight—without any thought beyond—
And whatsoe’er of virtue good or ill,