Her life is but three hundred and nine years less in duration than that of the many-centuried patriarch Methuselah. When the lassitude of age begins to creep upon her, she wings across sea and land to the sole Arabian Tree. There she builds a nest of aromatic twigs, cassia and frankincense, and enkindling it with her own dying ardour she is consumed to ashes. And yet—while still they are of a heat beyond the tempering of the sun that shines down on them from the heavens, they magically stir, take body and awaken; and she rearises to life renewed, in her gold, her rose carnation, her purple and azure blue.
[164]. "The Bower of Bliss."
This and No. 348 are but the merest fragments of the Faerie Queene; but they show of what an echoing mutable music are its words. And were ever light and colour so living, natural and crystal clear? Reading this verse, hearing its sounds and seeing its sights in the imagination, you cannot think Thomas Nash was too fantastical when he wrote: "Poetry is the Honey of all Flowers, the Quintessence of all Sciences, the Marrow of Art and the very Phrase of Angels." Indeed, as Spenser's epitaph in Westminster Abbey says of him, he was the Prince of Poets of his time, whose divine spirit needs no other witness than the works which he left behind him. And poet of poets he has always remained. John Keats, when he was a boy, used to sit in a little summerhouse at Enfield with his schoolfellow Cowden Clarke, simply drinking in this verse, and laying up store of purest English for his own brief life's matchless work. So, too, Abraham Cowley:
"How this love (for poetry) came to be produced in me so early is a hard question. I believe I can tell the particular little chance that filled my head first with such chimes of verse as have never since left ringing there. For I remember when I began to read, and to take some pleasure in it, there was wont to lie in my mother's parlour (I know not by what accident, for she herself never in her life read any book but of devotion), but there was wont to lie Spenser's works; this I happened to fall upon, and was infinitely delighted with the stories of the knights and giants and monsters and brave houses which I found everywhere there (though my understanding had little to do with all this); and by degrees with the tinkling of the rhyme and dance of the numbers, so that I think I had read him all over before I was twelve years old...."
[170].
The poems of Robert Herrick and of Thomas Campion though known well in their own day remained for many years practically unread and forgotten. Thomas Traherne's (who died in 1674) had an even more curious fate, for they were discovered in manuscript and by chance on a bookstall so lately as 1896, and were first taken to be the work of Henry Vaughan. Here is a passage in prose from Centuries of Meditation, by the same writer, repeating this reverie of his childhood in other words: "The corn was orient and immortal wheat which never should be reaped nor was ever sown. I thought it had stood from everlasting to everlasting. The dust and stones of the street were as precious as gold; the gates were at first the end of the world. The green trees when I saw them first through one of the gates transported and ravished me; their sweetness and unusual beauty made my heart to leap, and almost mad with ecstasy, they were such strange and wonderful things. The men! oh, what venerable and reverend creatures did the aged seem! Immortal cherubims! And young men glittering and sparkling angels! and maids strange seraphic pieces of life and beauty! Boys and girls tumbling in the street were moving jewels: I knew not that they were born or should die. But all things abided eternally as they were in their proper places. Eternity was manifest in the light of the day, and something infinite behind everything appeared, which talked with my expectation and moved my desire...."
[172]. "But silly we." (line 9)
This poem, I think carries with it the thought that in study of that great book, that fair volume, called the World, there is no full stop, no limit, pause, conclusion. Like bees, with their nectar and honeycomb, man stores up his knowledge and experience in books. These and his houses outlast him; the things he makes; and here and there a famous or happy or tragic name is for a while remembered. Else, we have our Spring and Summer—and dark cold skies enough, many of us—then vanish away, seeming but restless phantoms in Time's enormous dream. So far at least as this world is concerned. And generations of men—as of the grasses and flowers—follow one upon the other.
Oh, yes, my dear, you have a Mother,