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In our study we have noted the Transition Poets, of whom Daniel is chief; the Song Writers, Campion and Breton; the Spenserian Poets, Wither and Giles Fletcher; the Metaphysical Poets, Donne and Herbert; the Cavalier Poets, Herrick, Carew, Lovelace, and Suckling; John Milton, his life, his early or Horton poems, his militant prose, and his last great poetical works; John Bunyan, his extraordinary life, and his chief work, The Pilgrim's Progress; the Minor Prose Writers, Burton, Browne, Fuller, Taylor, Baxter, and Walton.
They reached the church and passed up the nave, the deep-coloured glass of the narrow windows rendering the gloom of the morning almost night itself inside the building. Then the ceremony began. The only warmth or spirit imported into it came from the bridegroom, who retained a vigorous even Spenserian bridal-mood throughout the morning.
Before I had quite forgotten him, however, I did pick up one other book of about his size, and in the same one-covered condition; and this attracted me more, because it was in verse. Rhyme had always a sort of magnetic power over me, whether I caught at any idea it contained or not. This was written in the measure which I afterwards learned was called Spenserian.
From the height of that new simplicity which this philosophy has gained not as the elder philosophies had gained theirs, by pure contemplation, by hasty abstraction and retreat to the a priori sources of knowledge and belief in man, which it has gained, too, by a wider induction than the facts of the human nature can supply with the torch of these universal principles cleared of their historic complexities, with the torch of the nature that is formed in everything, it enters here this great, unenclosed field of human life and practice, this Spenserian wilderness, where those old, gnarled trunks, and tangled boughs, and wretched undergrowths of centuries, stop the way, where those old monsters, which the action of this play exposes, which this philosophy is bound to drag out to the day, are hid.
The third was added in 1816, the fourth in 1818. It is written in the Spenserian stanza, with here and there songs and ballads in other meters, and in the first few verses there is even an affectation of Spenserian wording. But the poet soon grew tired of that, and returned to his own English.
Poet, dau. of a clergyman, made an unhappy marriage, though she had beauty and amiable manners, and was highly popular in society. She wrote a good deal of verse; but her chief poem was a translation in Spenserian stanza of the tale of Cupid and Psyche, which won the admiration of such men as Sir J. Mackintosh, Moore, and Keats.
Spenser invented for himself a new stanza of nine lines and made it famous, so that we call it after him, the Spenserian Stanza. It was like Chaucer's stanza of seven lines, called the Rhyme Royal, with two lines more added. Spenser admired Chaucer above all poets. He called him "The Well of English undefiled,"* and after many hundred years we still feel the truth of the description.
The occasional obscurities, which had risen from an imperfect control over the resources of his native language, had almost wholly disappeared, together with that worse defect of arbitrary and illogical phrases, at once hackneyed and fantastic, which hold so distinguished a place in the technique of ordinary poetry, and will, more or less, alloy the earlier poems of the truest genius, unless the attention has been specially directed to their worthlessness and incongruity . I did not perceive anything particular in the mere style of the poem alluded to during its recitation, except indeed such difference as was not separable from the thought and manner; and the Spenserian stanza, which always, more or less, recalls to the reader's mind Spenser's own style, would doubtless have authorized, in my then opinion, a more frequent descent to the phrases of ordinary life, than could without an ill effect have been hazarded in the heroic couplet.
Gertrude of Wyoming, 1809, a long narrative poem in Spenserian stanza, is untrue to the scenery and life of Pennsylvania, where its scene is laid. But Campbell turned his rhetorical manner and his clanking, martial verse to fine advantage in such pieces as Hohenlinden, Ye Mariners of England, and the Battle of the Baltic. These have the true lyric fire, and rank among the best English war-songs.
The manner of the Elizabethan poets was pushed into mannerism by their successors. That manner, at its best, was hardly a simple one, but in the Stuart and Commonwealth writers it became mere extravagance. Thus Phineas Fletcher a cousin of the dramatist composed a long Spenserian allegory, the Purple Island, descriptive of the human body.
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