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Great poet, and good man, Ariosto! your terrors are better than Dante's; for they warn, as far as warning can do good, and they neither afflict humanity nor degrade God.
Spenser has imitated this sublime piece of pleasantry; for, by a curious intermixture of all which the mind can experience from such a fiction, pleasant it is in the midst of its sublimity,—laughable with satirical archness, as well as grand and terrible in the climax. The transformation in Spenser is from a jealous man into Jealousy. His wife has gone to live with the Satyrs, and a villain has stolen his money. The husband, in order to persuade his wife to return, steals into the horde of the Satyrs, by mixing with their flock of goats,—as Norandino does in a passage imitated from Homer by Ariosto. The wife flatly refuses to do any such thing, and the poor wretch is obliged to steal out again.
"So soon as he the prison door did pass,
He ran as fast as both his feet could bear,
And never looked who behind him was,
Nor scarcely who before. Like as a bear
That creeping close among the hives, to rear
An honeycomb, the wakeful dogs espy,
And him assailing, sore his carcass tear,
That hardly he away with life does fly,
Nor stays till safe himself he see from jeopardy.
Nor stay'd he till be came unto the place
Where late his treasure he entombèd had;
Where, when he found it not (for Trompart base
Had it purloined for his master bad),
With extreme fury he became quite mad,
And ran away—ran with himself away;
That who so strangely had him seen bestad,
With upstart hair and staring eyes' dismay,
From Limbo-lake him late escapèd sure would say.
High over hills and over dales he fled,
As if the wind him on his wings had borne;
Nor bank nor bush could stay him, when he sped
His nimble feet, as treading still on thorn;
Grief, and Despite, and Jealousy, and Scorn,
Did all the way him follow hard behind;
And he himself himself loath'd so forlorn,
So shamefully forlorn of womankind,
That, as a snake, still lurkèd in his wounded mind.
Still fled he forward, looking backward still;
Nor stay'd his flight nor fearful agony
Till that he came unto a rocky hill
Over the sea suspended dreadfully,
That living creature it would terrify
To look a-down, or upward to the height
From thence he threw himself dispiteously,
All desperate of his fore-damnèd spright,
That seem'd no help for him was left in living sight.
But through long anguish and self-murd'ring thought,
He was so wasted and forpinèd quite,
That all his substance was consumed to nought,
And nothing left but like an airy sprite;
That on the rocks he fell so flit and light,
That he thereby received no hurt at all;
But chancèd on a craggy cliff to light;
Whence he with crooked claws so long did crawl,
That at the last he found a cave with entrance small.
Into the same he creeps, and thenceforth there
Resolved to build his baleful mansion,
In dreary darkness, and continual fear
Of that rock's fall, which ever and anon
Threats with huge ruin him to fall upon,
That he dare never sleep, but that one eye
Still ope he keeps for that occasion;
Nor ever rests he in tranquillity,
The roaring billows beat his bower so boisterously.
Nor ever is he wont on aught to feed
But toads and frogs, his pasture poisonous,
Which in his cold complexion do breed
A filthy blood, or humour rancorous,
Matter of doubt and dread suspicious,
That doth with cureless care consume the heart,
Corrupts the stomach with gall vicious,
Cross-cuts the liver with internal smart,
And doth transfix the soul with death's eternal dart.