As showing his pathos, Mr. Lowell read Una’s lament on her desertion by the Red Cross Knight, and other pieces, calling attention particularly to the fact that his females were not women, like those of Shakspeare, but ideal beings.
We are accustomed to apologize for the grossness of our favorite old authors by saying that their age was to blame, and not they. Spenser needs no such excuses. He is the most perfect gentleman among poets. Through that unrefined time, when ladies drank a quart of ale for breakfast, and even Hamlet can say a coarse thing to Ophelia, Spenser passes pure and chaste as another Sir Galahad.
Whoever can endure unmixed delight, whoever can tolerate music, and painting, and poetry, all in one, whoever wishes to be rid of thought and to let the busy anvils of the brain be silent for a time, let him read in the “Faëry Queene.” There is a land of pure Heart’s Ease where no ache or sorrow of spirit can enter. If there be any poet whom we can love and feel grateful toward, it is Edmund Spenser.
LECTURE VII
MILTON
(Tuesday Evening, January 30, 1855)
VII
Between Spenser and Milton occurred the most truly imaginative period of English poetry. It is the time of Shakspeare and of the other dramatists only less than he. It seems to have been the moment in which the English mind culminated.
Even if we subtract Shakspeare, the age remains without a parallel. The English nature was just then giving a great heave and yearn toward freedom in politics and religion, and literature could not fail to partake of the movement.
A wave of enthusiasm seemed to break over England; all that was poetical in the people found expression in deed or word. Everything tasted of it—sermons and speeches as well as verses. The travelers could not write a dry journal, but they somehow blundered into a poetical phrase that clings to the memory like a perfume. The sensations of men were as fresh as Adam’s, and the words they found to speak them in could be beautiful or fragrant with as little effort as it costs violets to be blue.