SPENSER'S ENGLISH RIVERS 



Critics of Spenser have often remarked that he is eminently a 

 pictorial poet. His poetry is like a gallery crowded with pictures 

 of all kinds — portrait, genre, landscape, free invention — ever 

 varied in their composition, spirit, and significance. To the 

 restricted uses of mural decoration his designs are admirably 

 suited, and one wonders that mural painters, as they confront 

 great wall-spaces teeming with possibilities unrealized, have not 

 discovered the vast riches lying at arm's length in the poetry of 

 Spenser. No other poet is more fertile in designs which, both in 

 subject and manner, would lend themselves to this kind of paint- 

 ing. They are highly objectified, symmetrical, spectacular, and 

 vivid with color and motion. Spenser's art is in a peculiar meas- 

 ure decorative. Surely it was in large part this excellence of 

 the poet in pictorial pageantry that delighted ]\Iilton with his 



Pomp, and feast, and revelry. 

 With mask and antique pageantry, 

 Such sights as youthful poets dream 

 On summer eves, by haunted stream. 



Some of Spenser's greatest and most conspicuous passages are 

 in their primary effect spectacular. They present a crowded 

 stage filled with gorgeous, rapidly shifting color. Among his 

 favorite themes are elaborate tableaux, visionary and emblematic, 

 or thronging processions, or glimpses of a crumbling antique 

 world, fading in rich and solemn splendor. Examples will multi- 

 ply in the mind of every reader, from the fanciful idylls in the 

 April and the June eclogue of the ShepJierd's Calendar, to the 

 highly wrought wedding-procession in the Epithalamion. 



In each book of the Faery Queen the poet has introduced one 

 or more conspicuous examples of elaborated spectacle. In the 

 First Book are the procession of the Seven Deadly Sins and the 

 series of episodes in the House of Holiness ; in the Second, the 

 Cave of ^Mammon, the House of Temperance, the Voyage of 

 Life, and the Bower of Bliss; in the Third, the Gardens of 

 Adonis, the House of Busirane, and the Mask of Cupid; in the 

 Fifth, the Wedding of Florimel, the Temple of Isis, and the 

 Hall of Mercilla; in the Sixth, the Dance of the Graces; in 

 the fragment of the so-called Seventh, the Trial of Mutability. 



