Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: June 2, 2025
But it is one of the books which I should like to see, either in a translation or its own exquisite Greek, in the hands of every young man. It is not all fact. It is but a historic romance. But it is better than history. It is an ideal book, like Sidney's "Arcadia" or Spenser's "Fairy Queen" the ideal self-education of an ideal hero.
Chaucer had them in his garlands, and Spenser's "flock of nymphes" gather them "pallid blew" in a meadow by the river side. In Percy's Reliques they are the "violets that first appear, by purple mantles known." Milton allows Zephyr to find Aurora lying "on beds of violet blue." Shakespeare places them upon Ophelia's grave and says they are "sweeter than the lids of Juno's eyes."
In the "Monk's Tale" there is a melodious measure which may have furnished the model for Spenser's famous stanza. Chaucer's poetry is extremely musical and must be judged by the ear rather than by the eye.
There was the irresistible outbreak against "that putrid carcase, that mother of all evil the French Revolution." It reminded him of the accursed things that crawled in and out of the mouth of the vile hag in Spenser's Cave of Error; and he repeated the nauseous stanza.
Spenser's newspaper connection got them passes over one of the cheaper lines to New York and he tried to console himself by setting this down as a saving of forty dollars against the eighty dollars of the debit item. But he couldn't altogether forget that they would have traveled on passes, anyhow.
But Spenser's imagination was a powerful spirit, and held all these diverse elements in solution. He removed them to an ideal sphere "apart from place, withholding time," where they seem all alike equally real, the dateless conceptions of the poet's dream.
A stalwart, hearty man, with a great redundance of flesh and blood, who could "put the stone" with Finlayson, or climb with the hardiest of the Ben-Nevis guides, or cast a fly with the daintiest of the Low-Country fishers, redundant of imagination, redundant of speech, and with such exuberance in him that we feel surfeit from the overflow, as at the reading of Spenser's "Faërie Queene," and lay him down with a wearisome sense of mental indigestion.
Beginning with Chaucer, his "Canterbury Pilgrims" is English, both in scene and character; it is even mentioned of the Abbess that "Frenche of Paris was to her unknowe"; but his "Legende of Goode Women" might, so far as its subject-matter is concerned, have been written by a French, a Spanish, or an Italian Chaucer, just as well as by the British Daniel. Spenser's "Faerie Queene" numbers St.
In one way or another the rediscovery of Plato proved the most valuable part of the Renaissance's gift from Greece. The doctrines of the Symposium coloured in Italy the writings of Castiglione and Mirandula. In England they gave us Spenser's "Hymn to Intellectual Beauty," and they affected, each in his own way, Sir Philip Sidney, and others of the circle of court writers of his time.
heard a mermaid on a dolphin's back Uttering such dulcet and harmonious breath That the rude sea grew civil at her song. But in considering the literature of Elizabeth's reign it will be convenient to speak first of the prose. While following up Spenser's career to its close we have, for the sake of unity of treatment, anticipated somewhat the literary history of the twenty years preceding.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking