all this there is ample evidence in his verse.
Yet the alchemy of his poetry has passed through the potent alembics of
verse and phrase all these rebellious things, and has distilled them into
the inimitably fluent and velvet medium which seems to lull some readers to
inattention by its very smoothness, and deceive others into a belief in its
lack of matter by the very finish and brilliancy of its form. The show
passages of the poem which are most generally known--the House of Pride,
the Cave of Despair, the Entrance of Belphoebe, the Treasury of Mammon, the
Gardens of Acrasia, the Sojourn of Britomart in Busirane's Castle, the
Marriage of the Thames and Medway, the Discovery of the False Florimel,
Artegall and the Giant, Calidore with Meliboeus, the Processions of the
Seasons and the Months--all these are not, as is the case with so many
other poets, mere purple patches, diversifying and relieving dullness, but
rather remarkable, and as it happens easily separable examples of a power
which is shown constantly and almost evenly throughout. Those who admire
them do well; but they hardly know Spenser. He, more than almost any other
poet, must be read continuously and constantly till the eye and ear and
mind have acquired the freedom of his realm of enchantment, and have learnt
the secret (as far as a mere reader may learn it) of the poetical spells
by which he brings together and controls its wonders. The talk of
tediousness, the talk of sameness, the talk of coterie-cultivation in
Spenser shows bad taste no doubt; but it rather shows ignorance. The critic
has in such cases stayed outside his author; he speaks but of what he has
_not_ seen.

The comparative estimate is always the most difficult in literature, and
where it can be avoided it is perhaps best to avoid it. But in Spenser's
case this is not possible. He is one of those few who can challenge the
title of "greatest English poet," and the reader may almost of right demand
the opinion on this point of any one who writes about him. For my part I
have no intention of shirking the difficulty. It seems to me that putting
Shakespere aside as _hors concours_, not merely in degree but in kind, only
two English poets can challenge Spenser for the primacy. These are Milton
and Shelley. The poet of _The Faerie Queene_ is generally inferior to
Milton in the faculty of concentration, and in the minting of those
monumental phrases, impressive of themselves and quite apart from th