se and the
effect, the real thing with the personified representative of the
thing; in short, because it differs from the language of good sense!
That the 'Phoebus' is hackneyed, and a school-boy image, is an
accidental fault, dependent on the age in which the author wrote, and
not deduced from the nature of the thing. That it is part of an
exploded mythology, is an objection more deeply grounded. Yet when the
torch of ancient learning was rekindled, so cheering were its beams,
that our eldest poets, cut off by Christianity from all accredited
machinery, and deprived of all acknowledged guardians and symbols of
the great objects of nature, were naturally induced to adopt, as a
poetic language, those fabulous personages, those forms of the
supernatural in nature, which had given them such dear delight in the
poems of their great masters. Nay, even at this day what scholar of
genial taste will not so far sympathize with them, as to read with
pleasure in Petrarch, Chaucer, or Spenser, what he would perhaps
condemn as puerile in a modern poet?

I remember no poet, whose writings would safelier stand the test of
Mr. Wordsworth's theory, than Spenser. Yet will Mr. Wordsworth say,
that the style of the following stanza is either undistinguished from
prose, and the language of ordinary life? Or that it is vicious, and
that the stanzas are blots in the _Faerie Queene_?

By this the northern wagoner had set
His sevenfold teme behind the steadfast starre,
That was in ocean waves yet never wet,
But firme is fixt, and sendeth light from farre
To all that in the wild deep wandering are:
And chearful chanticleer with his note shrill
Had warned once that Phoebus' fiery carre
In haste was climbing up the easterne hill,
Full envious that night so long his roome did fill.

Book I, Can. 2, St. 2.

At last the golden orientall gate
Of greatest heaven gan to open fayre,
And Phoebus fresh, as brydegrome to his mate,
Came dauncing forth, shaking his deawie hayre,
And hurl'd his glist'ring beams through gloomy ayre:
Which when the wakeful elfe perceived, streightway
He started up, and did him selfe prepayre
In sun-bright armes and battailous array;
For with that pagan proud he combat will that day.

Book I, Can. 5, St. 2.

On the contrary to how many passages, both in hymn books and in blank
verse