of
life which it was his duty to support--and it is perhaps a half
understanding of this that has made so many generations believe that he
was the first poet laureate, the first salaried moralist among the
poets. His processions of deadly sins, and his houses, where the very
cornices are arbitrary images of virtue, are an unconscious hypocrisy,
an undelighted obedience to the 'rugged forehead,' for all the while he
is thinking of nothing but lovers whose bodies are quivering with the
memory or the hope of long embraces. When they are not together, he will
indeed embroider emblems and images much as those great ladies of the
courts of love embroidered them in their castles; and when these are
imagined out of a thirst for magnificence and not thought out in a mood
of edification, they are beautiful enough; but they are always
tapestries for corridors that lead to lovers' meetings or for the walls
of marriage chambers. He was not passionate, for the passionate feed
their flame in wanderings and absences, when the whole being of the
beloved, every little charm of body and of soul, is always present to
the mind, filling it with heroical subtleties of desire. He is a poet of
the delighted senses, and his song becomes most beautiful when he writes
of those islands of Phaedria and Acrasia, which angered 'that rugged
forehead,' as it seems, but gave to Keats his _Belle Dame sans Merci_
and his 'perilous seas in faery lands forlorn,' and to William Morris
his 'waters of the wondrous Isle.'

V

The dramatists lived in a disorderly world, reproached by many,
persecuted even, but following their imagination wherever it led them.
Their imagination, driven hither and thither by beauty and sympathy, put
on something of the nature of eternity. Their subject was always the
soul, the whimsical, self-awakening, self-exciting, self-appeasing soul.
They celebrated its heroical, passionate will going by its own path to
immortal and invisible things. Spenser, on the other hand, except among
those smooth pastoral scenes and lovely effeminate islands that have
made him a great poet, tried to be of his time, or rather of the time
that was all but at hand. Like Sidney, whose charm it may be led many
into slavery, he persuaded himself that we enjoy Virgil because of the
virtues of AEneas, and so planned out his immense poem that it would set
before the imagination of citizens, in whom there would soon be no great
energy, innumerable blameless