nrace,
That mortall men her glory should admyre.
In gentle Ladies breste, and bounteous race
Of woman kind, it fayrest Flowre doth spyre,
And beareth fruit of honour and all chast desyre.

Fayre ympes of beautie, whose bright shining beames
Adorne the worlde with like to heavenly light,
And to your willes both royalties and Reames
Subdew, through conquest of your wondrous might,
With this fayre flowre your goodly girlonds dight
Of chastity and vertue virginall,
That shall embellish more your beautie bright,
And crowne your heades with heavenly coronall,
Such as the Angels weare before Gods tribunall!

This sense of beauty, and command of beautiful expression is not seen
only in the sweetness of which both these passages are examples. Its
range is wide. Spenser had in his nature besides sweetness, his full
proportion of the stern and high manliness of his generation; indeed, he
was not without its severity, its hardness, its unconsidering and cruel
harshness, its contemptuous indifference to suffering and misery when on
the wrong side. Noble and heroic ideals captivate him by their
attractions. He kindles naturally and genuinely at what proves and draws
out men's courage, their self-command, their self-sacrifice. He
sympathizes as profoundly with the strangeness of their condition, with
the sad surprises in their history and fate, as he gives himself up with
little restraint to what is charming and even intoxicating in it. He can
moralize with the best in terse and deep-reaching apophthegms of
melancholy or even despairing experience. He can appreciate the
mysterious depths and awful outlines of theology--of what our own age
can see nothing in, but a dry and scholastic dogmatism. His great
contemporaries were, more perhaps than the men of any age, many-sided.
He shared their nature; and he used all that he had of sensitiveness and
of imaginative and creative power, in bringing out its manifold aspects,
and sometimes contradictory feelings and aims. Not that beauty, even
varied beauty, is the uninterrupted attribute of his work. It alternates
with much that no indulgence can call beautiful. It passes but too
easily into what is commonplace, or forced, or unnatural, or
extravagant, or careless and poor, or really coarse and bad. He was a
negligent corrector. He only at times gave himself the trouble to
condense and concentrate. But for all this, the _Faer