all the cares and business of life.  Of all the poets, he is the most poetical.  Though much later than Chaucer, his obligations to preceding writers were less.  He has in some measure borrowed the plan of his poem (as a number of distinct narratives) from Ariosto; but he has engrafted upon it an exuberance of fancy, and an endless voluptuousness of sentiment, which are not to be found in the Italian writer.  Farther, Spenser is even more of an inventor in the subject-matter.  There is an originality, richness, and variety in his allegorical personages and fictions, which almost vies with the splendor of the ancient mythology.  If Ariosto transports us into the regions of romance, Spenser’s poetry is all fairy-land.  In Ariosto, we walk upon the ground, in a company, gay, fantastic, and adventurous enough.  In Spenser, we wander in another world, among ideal beings.  The poet takes and lays us in the lap of a lovelier nature, by the sound of softer streams, among greener hills and fairer valleys.  He paints nature, not as we find it, but as we expected to find it; and fulfils the delightful promise of our youth.  He waves his wand of enchantment—­and at once embodies airy beings, and throws a delicious veil over all actual objects.  The two worlds of reality and of fiction are poised on the wings of his imagination.  His ideas, indeed, seem more distinct than his perceptions.  He is the painter of abstractions, and describes them with dazzling minuteness.  In the Mask of Cupid he makes the God of Love “clap on high his coloured winges twain”:  and it is said of Gluttony, in the Procession of the Passions,

      “In green vine leaves he was right fitly clad.”

At times he becomes picturesque from his intense love of beauty; as where he compares Prince Arthur’s crest to the appearance of the almond tree: 

      “Upon the top of all his lofty crest,
        A bunch of hairs discolour’d diversely
      With sprinkled pearl and gold full richly drest
        Did shake and seem’d to daunce for jollity;
      Like to an almond tree ymounted high
        On top of green Selenis all alone,
      With blossoms brave bedecked daintily;
        Her tender locks do tremble every one
      At every little breath that under heav’n is blown.”

The love of beauty, however, and not of truth, is the moving principle of his mind; and he is guided in his fantastic delineations by no rule but the impulse of an inexhaustible imagination.  He luxuriates equally in scenes of Eastern magnificence; or the still solitude of a hermit’s cell—­in the extremes of sensuality or refinement.

In reading the Faery Queen, you see a little withered old man by a wood-side opening a wicket, a giant, and a dwarf lagging far behind, a damsel in a boat upon an enchanted lake, wood-nymphs, and satyrs, and all of a sudden you are transported into a lofty palace, with tapers burning, amidst knights and ladies, with dance and revelry, and song, “and mask, and antique pageantry.”  What can be more solitary, more shut up in itself, than his description of the house of Sleep, to which Archimago sends for a dream: