Spensers The Faerie Queene | Page 9

poets.
"I think that if he had not been a great poet," says Leigh Hunt, "he
would have been a great painter."
"After reading," says Pope, "a canto of Spenser two or three days ago
to an old lady, between seventy and eighty years of age, she said that I
had been showing her a gallery of pictures. I do not know how it is, but
she said very right. There is something in Spenser that pleases one as
strongly in old age as it did in youth. I read the Faerie Queene when I
was about twelve, with infinite delight; and I think it gave me as much,
when I read it over about a year or two ago."
The imperishable charm of the poem lies in its appeal to the pure sense
of beauty. "A beautiful pagan dream," says Taine, "carries on a
beautiful dream of chivalry." The reader hears in its lines a stately and

undulating rhythm that intoxicates the ear and carries him on with an
irresistible fascination, he sees the unsubstantial forms of fairyland go
sweeping by in a gorgeous and dreamlike pageantry, and he feels
pulsing in its luxuriant and enchanted atmosphere the warm and
beauty-loving temper of the Italian Renaissance. "Spenser is superior to
his subject," says Taine, "comprehends it fully, frames it with a view to
the end, in order to impress upon it the proper mark of his soul and his
genius. Each story is modified with respect to another, and all with
respect to a certain effect which is being worked out. Thus a beauty
issues from this harmony,--the beauty in the poet's heart,--which his
whole work strives to express; a noble and yet a laughing beauty, made
up of moral elevation and sensuous seductions, English in sentiment,
Italian in externals, chivalric in subject, modern in its perfection,
representing a unique and admirable epoch, the appearance of
paganism in a Christian race, and the worship of form by an
imagination of the North."
CHRONOLOGICAL TABLE
EVENTS IN SPENSER'S LIFE A.D. CONTEMPORARY
EVENTS
Birth of Edmund Spenser (about) 1552 Birth of Sir Walter Raleigh
1553 Death of Edward
VI; Mary crowned.
1554 Mary marries
Philip of Spain.
1558 Death of Mary;
Elizabeth crowned.
1560 Charles IX,
king of France.
1568 Council of
Trent.
Visions of Bellay, published, 1569
Sonnets of Petrarch, published,
1569
Enters Pembroke Hall, Cambridge, 1569
1572 Gregory XIII,
Pope of Rome.

1572 Massacre of St.
Batholomew.
1574 Henry III, king
of France.
Received M.A., leaves Cambridge, 1576 Rudolph II,
emperor.
Leaves Lancashire, 1578 Elizabeth
aids the Netherlands.
Visits Lord Leicester, 1579
The Shepheards Calender, 1579
Goes to Ireland, 1580 Massacre of
Smerwick.
1581 Tasso's
Jersalem Delivered.
Lord Grey's return to England, 1582