The feature in this theory of Platonism which appealed to Spenser was the high nature of the beauty seen in comeliness of form, as explained by its doctrine of æsthetics. A sense of beauty as a spiritual quality spreading its divine radiance over the objects of the outward world envelops the poem in a golden haze of softened feeling characteristic of Spenser’s poetic manner. The scientific terms of the Platonic theorist melt away into the gentle flow of his verse. The soul being informed with its idea, as Ficino had put it, has become in his “Hymne in Honour of Beautie” that “faire lampe” which has “resemblence of that heavenly light” of beauty (ll. 102, 124); or the idea of beauty in the soul is spoken of as
“the light
Which in it selfe it hath remaining still;”
(ll. 221–222.)
or, as the lover’s “spirits proportion.”
In accordance with the same sense of beauty Spenser in the “Hymne in Honour of Love” stops to explain away the cruelty which love seems to show in afflicting him, an innocent sufferer, by calling attention to the fact that such suffering is necessary to try the lover’s sincerity in his worship of so high a thing as the beauty of his beloved. Love is not physical desire, but a soaring of the mind to a sight of that high beauty,
“For love is Lord of truth and loialtie,
Lifting himselfe out of the lowly dust,
On golden plumes up to the purest skie,
Above the reach of loathly sinfull lust,