io8 Charles G. Osgood. 



'endlesse worke,' harder than 'to tell the sands, or count the 

 starres,' incapable of perfection, though the poet had 'an 

 hundred tongues, . . . And hundred mouthes and voice of 

 brasse, . . . and endlesse memorie';''® and as the reader, with 

 an eye to the poet's originals, watches him in the process of 

 selection, arrangement, and adaptation, he cannot doubt the 

 pains which Spenser bestowed upon this episode. 



Yet the final effect is anything but laborious. The entire 

 canto is full of life and measured freedom, crowded but well 

 ordered, moving to the finest cadence of Spenser's music. Nor 

 is it composed of mere spectacle and pageantry. Beneath it all 

 one catches the vastly varied sounds of water, its murmur, it 

 tinkle, its rush, its roar. The whole picture is permeated with 

 the spirit of water, and expresses its variableness, power, and 

 beauty as subtly and surely as these are to be felt in Undine. 



"xi. 9, 53; xii. I, 2. 



