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_ and _Beauty_, _Heavenly Love_ and _Heavenly Beauty_, are also stately and noble poems, but by reason of their abstractness and the Platonic mysticism which they express, are less generally pleasing than the others mentioned. Allegory and mysticism had no natural affiliation with Spenser's genius. He was a seer of visions, of _images_ full, brilliant, and distinct; and not, like Bunyan, Dante, or Hawthorne, a projector into bodily shapes of _ideas_, typical and emblematic; the shadows which haunt the conscience and the mind.
1. English Writers. Henry Morley. Cassell & Co., 1887. 4 vols.
2. Skeat's Specimens of English Literature, 1394-1579 (Clarendon Press Series.) Oxford.
3. Morte Darthur. London: Macmillan & Co., 1868. (Globe Edition.)
4. English and Scottish Ballads. Edited by Francis J. Child. Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1859. 8 vols.
5. Spenser's Poetical Works. Edited by Richard Morris. London: Macmillan & Co., 1877. (Globe Edition.)
6. "A Royal Poet." In Washington Irving's Sketch Book. New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1864.
The great age of English poetry opened with the publication of Spenser's _Shepheard's Calendar_, in 1579, and closed with the printing of Milton's _Samson Agonistes_, in 1671. Within this period of little less than a century English thought passed through many changes, and there were several successive phases of style in our imaginative literature. Milton, who acknowledged Spenser as his master, and who was a boy of eight years at Shakspere's death, lived long enough to witness the establishment of an entirely new school of poets, in the persons of Dryden and his contemporaries. But, roughly speaking, the dates above given mark the limits of one literary epoch, which may not improperly be called the Elizabethan. In strictness the Elizabethan age ended with the queen's death, in 1603. But the poets of the succeeding reigns inherited much of the glow and splendor which marked the diction of their forerunners; and "the spacious times of great Elizabeth" have been, by courtesy, prolonged to the year of the Restoration (1660). There is a certain likeness in the intellectual products of the whole period, a largeness of utterance and a high imaginative cast of thought which stamp them all alike with the queen's seal.