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The first two years, during which he lived with his self-sacrificing sister at Racedown, in Dorset, were spent in half-hearted and very imperfectly successful experiments satires in imitation of Juvenal, the tragedy of "The Borderers," and a poem in the Spenserian stanza, the poem now entitled "Guilt and Sorrow."
His brother Giles made a better attempt at the Spenserian manner. His long poem, Christ's Victory and Death, shows for all its carefully Protestant tone high qualities of mysticism; across it Spenser and Milton join hands. It was, however, in pastoral poetry that Spenser's influence found its pleasantest outlet. One might hesitate to advise a reader to embark on either of the Fletchers.
Bowdich, which equally merits commendation. Powerful as may be the aid which the editor has received from the contributors to the "Friendship's Offering," we are bound to distinguish one of his own pieces Glen-Lynden, a Tale of Teviot-dale, as the sun of the volume. It is in Spenserian verse, and a more graceful composition cannot be found in either of the Annuals.
Here is the sweet mournfulness of the Spenserian time, upon whose joys Death is the only intruder. Pass onward a little, and you are in presence of the tremendous Two-handed engine at the door, the terror of which is enhanced by its obscurity. We are very sure that the avenger is there, though we know not who he is.
You are really liberal. You, Old Church, are of use, by keeping unforgot the effigies of old religion, and reviving the tone of pure Spenserian sentiment, which this time is apt to stifle in its childish haste. But you are very faulty in censuring and wishing to limit others by your own standard. You, Self-Poise, fill a priestly office.
In the Arcadia there is a certain charm, but it belongs to the inset verse to the almost Spenserian visionariness of parts to the gracious lulling atmosphere of the whole. If it had been published in three volumes, one cannot imagine the most enthusiastic novel-reader knocking up a friend late at night for volume two or volume three.
The first of these treated in four books Christ's temptation in the wilderness, a subject that had already been handled in the Spenserian allegorical manner by Giles Fletcher, a brother of the Purple Islander, in his Christ's Victory and Triumph, 1610. The superiority of Paradise Lost to its sequel is not without significance. The Puritans were Old Testament men.
At that time there lay, almost uncalled for, on the publisher's shelf, where it had lain for five years, ever since its issue, a poem of fifty-five Spenserian stanzas, flushed with a subtler beauty, more divinely dyed in pathos, than any in English literature of its rare kind, or of any kind out of Shakespeare, a poem in which all the inward harvests of a tender, deep, capacious, loving, and religious life, all the heaped hoards of feeling and imagination in a life most visionary and most real, are gathered into one sheaf of poetic affluence, to dazzle and subdue with excess of light, or gathered rather into a bundle of sheaves, stanza rising on stanza, each like a flame fresh shooting from a hidden bed of Nature's most precious perfumes, each shedding a new and a richer fragrance; I mean the "Adonais" of Shelley.
I suffered this belief to get such absolute possession of my mind, that I had resumed my blotted papers, and was busy in meditation on the oft-recurring rhymes of the Spenserian stanza, when I heard a low and cautious tap at the door of my apartment. "Come in," I said, and Mr. Owen entered.
And although in this extraordinary production Shelley has still not quite found himself, the technical power displayed is great. The poem is in Spenserian stanzas, and he manages the long breaking wave of that measure with sureness and ease, imparting to it a rapidity of onset that is all his own.
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