The allegory is not always easy to follow.  It is kept up most carefully in the first two books, but it sat rather lightly on Spenser’s conscience, and is not of the essence of the poem.  It is an ornament put on from the outside and detachable at pleasure.  The “Spenserian stanza,” in which the Faerie Queene was written, was adapted from the ottava rima of Ariosto.  Spenser changed somewhat the order of the rimes in the first eight lines and added a ninth line of twelve syllables, thus affording more space to the copious luxuriance of his style and the long-drawn sweetness of his verse.  It was his instinct to dilate and elaborate every image to the utmost, and his similies, especially—­each of which usually fills a whole stanza—­have the pictorial amplitude of Homer’s.  Spenser was, in fact, a great painter.  His poetry is almost purely sensuous.  The personages in the Faerie Queene are not characters, but richly colored figures, moving to the accompaniment of delicious music, in an atmosphere of serene remoteness from the earth.  Charles Lamb said that he was the poet’s poet, that is, he appealed wholly to the artistic sense and to the love of beauty.  Not until Keats did another English poet appear so filled with the passion for outward shapes of beauty, so exquisitively alive to all impressions of the senses.  Spenser was, in some respects, more an Italian than an English poet.  It is said that the Venetian gondoliers still sing the stanzas of Tasso’s Gerusalemme Liberata.  It is not easy to imagine the Thames bargees chanting passages from the Faerie Queene.  Those English poets who have taken strongest hold upon their public have done so by their profound interpretation of our common life.  But Spenser escaped altogether from reality into a region of pure imagination.  His aerial creations resemble the blossoms of the epiphytic orchids, which have no root in the soil, but draw their nourishment from the moisture of the air.

  Their birth was of the womb of morning dew,
  And their conception of the glorious prime.

Among the minor poems of Spenser the most delightful were his Prothalamion and Epithalamion.  The first was a “spousal verse,” made for the double wedding of the Ladies Catherine and Elizabeth Somerset, whom the poet figures as two white swans that come swimming down the Thames, the surface of which the nymphs strew with lilies, till it appears “like a bride’s chamber-floor.”

  Sweet Thames, run softly till I end my song,

is the burden of each stanza.  The Epithalamion was Spenser’s own marriage song, written to crown his series of Amoretti or love sonnets, and is the most splendid hymn of triumphant love in the language.  Hardly less beautiful than these was Muiopotmos; or, the Fate of the Butterfly, an addition to the classical myth of Arachne, the spider.  The four hymns in praise of Love