“Forewarned, if little bird their pranks behold,
    ’Twill whisper in her ear and all the scene unfold.”

But the only one among the professed scholars of Spenser who caught the glow and splendor of the master was James Thomson.  It is the privilege of genius to be original even in its imitations.  Thomson took shape and hue from Spenser, but added something of his own, and the result has a value quite independent of its success as a reproduction.  “The Castle of Indolence,” 1748,[31] is a fine poem; at least the first part of it is, for the second book is tiresomely allegorical, and somewhat involved in plot.  There is a magic art in the description of the “land of drowsy-head,” with its “listless climate” always “atween June and May,"[32] its “stockdove’s plaint amid the forest deep,” its hillside woods of solemn pines, its gay castles in the summer clouds, and its murmur of the distance main.  The nucleus of Thomson’s conception is to be found in Spenser’s House of Morpheus ("Faerie Queene,” book i. canto i. 41), and his Country of Idlesse is itself an anticipation of Tennyson’s Lotus Land, but verse like this was something new in the poetry of the eighteenth century: 

    “Was nought around but images of rest: 
    Sleep-soothing groves and quiet lawns between;
    And flowery beds that slumberous influence kest,
    From poppies breathed; and beds of pleasant green,
    Where never yet was creeping creatures seen.

    “Meantime unnumbered glittering streamlets played
    And hurled everywhere their waters sheen;
    That, as they bickered through the sunny glade,
    Though restless still themselves, a lulling murmur made.”

“The Castle of Indolence” had the romantic iridescence, the “atmosphere” which is lacking to the sharp contours of Augustan verse.  That is to say, it produces an effect which cannot be wholly accounted for by what the poet says; an effect which is wrought by subtle sensations awakened by the sound and indefinite associations evoked by the words.  The secret of this art the poet himself cannot communicate.  But poetry of this kind cannot be translated into prose—­as Pope’s can—­any more than music can be translated into speech, without losing its essential character.  Like Spenser, Thomson was an exquisite colorist and his art was largely pictorial.  But he has touches of an imagination which is rarer, if not higher in kind, than anything in Spenser.  The fairyland of Spenser is an unreal, but hardly an unearthly region.  He seldom startles by glimpses behind the curtain which hangs between nature and the supernatural, as in Milton’s

    “Airy tongues that syllable men’s names
    On sands and shores and desert wildernesses.”

There is something of this power in one stanza, at least, of “The Castle of Indolence:”