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The Castle of Indolence, an allegorical poem in the Spenserian stanza, generally considered to be his masterpiece. In August following he caught a chill which developed into a fever, and carried him off in his 48th year. Though T. was undoubtedly a poet by nature, his art was developed by constant and fastidious polishing.
He might be a rather entertaining sort of poet; telling a smoking-room story in blank verse or writing a hunting-song in the Spenserian stanza; giving a realistic analysis of infanticide in a series of triolets; or proving the truth of Immortality in a long string of limericks. Browning certainly had no such indifference.
Whether a narrative be written in blank verse or the Spenserian stanza, in the long period of Gibbon or the chipped phrase of Charles Reade, the principles of the art of narrative must be equally observed.
It is no kind of beetle or butterfly, then, that this philosopher comes down upon here from the heights of his universal science his science of the nature of things in general, but that great Spenserian monstrosity, that diseased product of nature, which individual human nature, in spite of its natural pettiness and helplessness, under certain favourable conditions of absorption and accretion, may be made to yield.
The use of these two styles may be studied in the writings of one man, James Thomson. For besides acquiring a kind of anonymous immortality with patriots as the author of "Rule, Britannia," Thomson wrote two poems respectively in the Spenserian and the Miltonic manner, the former The Castle of Indolence, the latter The Seasons.
I had only the Times correspondent; where he was picturesque I could be picturesque allowing always for the Spenserian straining where he was rich in local colour I did my utmost to reproduce his colouring, stretched always on the Spenserian rack, and lengthened out by the bitter necessity of finding triple rhymes.
"Have you no other result of your travels?" he asked; and got for answer, "A few short pieces; and a lot of Spenserian stanzas; not worth troubling you with, but you are welcome to them." Dallas took the remark literally, saw they were a safe success, and assumed to himself the merit of the discovery, the risks, and the profits.
And about all these different kinds and others there clung and rang a peculiar dreamy slow music which was heard for the first time, and which has never been reproduced, a music which in "The Lotos Eaters," impossible as it might have seemed, adds a new charm after the Faerie Queen, after the Castle of Indolence, after the Revolt of Islam to the Spenserian stanza, which makes the stately verses of the "Palace" and the "Dream" tremble and cry with melodious emotion, and which accomplishes the miracle of the poet's own dying swan in a hundred other poems all "flooded over with eddying song."
Milton was himself a Spenserian; he owned to Dryden in later years that "Spenser was his original," and in some of his earliest lines at Horton he dwells lovingly on "the sage and solemn tones" of the "Faerie Queen," its "forests and enchantments drear, where more is meant than meets the ear." But of the weakness and affectation which characterized Spenser's successors he had not a trace.
The "Spenserian stanza," in which the Faerie Queene was written, was adapted from the ottava rima of Ariosto. Spenser changed somewhat the order of the rimes in the first eight lines and added a ninth line of twelve syllables, thus affording more space to the copious luxuriance of his style and the long-drawn sweetness of his verse.
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