She is the well of bountie and brave mynd, Excelling most in glorie and great light : And courts chief garlond with all vertues dight." 10. Pictorial Power.-"Nothing else [than the Spenserian stanza] could adapt itself so perfectly to the endless series of vignettes and dissolving views which the poet delights in giving.. The endless, various, brightly-colored, softly and yet distinctly outlined pictures rise and pass before the eyes and vanish without a break, without a jar, softer than sleep and as continuous, gayer than the rainbow and as undiscoverably connected with any obvious cause." — George Saintsbury. "It was this wondrous and various troop of ideal shapes, palpable to his own eye and domesticated in his own heart, that he sent forth, in an endless succession of pictures, through the magical pages of the Faery Queene.'"-E. P. Whipple. "He so bordered it [the Faery Queene'] with brightcolored fancies, he so often filled whole pages and crowded the text hard in others with the gay frolics of his pencil, that, as in the Grimani missal, the holy function of the book is forgotten in the ecstasy of its adornment. . The true use of him is as a gallery of pictures which we visit as the mood takes us, and where we spend an hour or two at a time, long enough to sweeten our perceptions, not so long as to clog them."-Lowell. "We shall nowhere find more airy and expansive images of visionary things, a sweeter tone of sentiment, or a finer flush in the colors of language than in this Rubens of English poetry."-Thomas Campbell. "Is it possible to refuse credence to a man who paints things for us with such accurate details and in such lovely colors? Here with a dash of his pen he describes a forest for you; and are you not instantly in it with him? Beech trees with their silvery stems; loftie trees iclad with sommer's pride, did spred so broad that heaven's light did hide;' rays of light tremble on the bark and shine on the ground, on the reddening ferns and low bushes, which, suddenly smitten with the luminous track, glisten and glimmer. Footsteps are scarcely heard on the thick beds of heaped leaves; and at distant intervals, on the tall herbage, drops of dew are sparkling. At every bend in the alley, at every change of light, a stanza, a word reveals a landscape or an apparition. It is morning, the white dawn gleams faintly through the trees; bluish vapors veil the horizon, and vanish in the smiling air; the springs tremble and murmur faintly amongst the mosses, and on high the poplar leaves begin to stir and flutter like the wings of butterflies. In every book we see strange processions pass by, allegorical and picturesque shows, like those which were then displayed at the courts of princes; now a masquerade of Cupid, now of the Rivers, now of the Months, now of the Vices. Here are finished pictures, true and complete, composed with a painter's feeling, with choice of tints and outlines; our eyes are delighted by them.. The poet, here and throughout, is a colorist Taine. and an architect.". "I think that if Spenser had not been a great poet he would have been a great painter, and in that case there is ground for believing that England would have possessedand in the person of one man-her Claude, her Annibal Caracci, her Correggio, her Titian, her Rembrandt, perhaps even her Raphael. I suspect that if Spenser's history were better known we should find that he was a passionate student of pictures, a haunter of the collections of his friends, Essex and Leicester. Spenser emulated the Raphaels and Titians in a profusion of pictures, many of which are here taken from their walls. They give the poet's poet a claim to a new title that of Poet of the Painters."-Leigh Hunt. "In reading his descriptions, one can hardly avoid being reminded of Rubens' allegorical pictures. Nobody but Rubens could have painted the fancy of Spenser; and he could not have given the sentiment, the airy dream that hovers over it."—William Hazlitt. ILLUSTRATIONS. "A little lowly hermitage it was, Downe in a dale, hard by a forests side, His holy thinges each morne and eventyde "Soone after this I saw on th' other side, It almost drowned was, and done to nought, At length, when most in perill it was brought, So now it is transform'd into that starre, "Here also playing on the grassy greene, The streames of Hebrus with his songs, I weene, Staied thee, (O Peneus!) powring foorth to thee, The verie nature of the place, resounding With gentle murmure of the breathing ayre, A pleasant bowre with all delight abounding In the fresh shadowe did for them prepayre, To rest their limbs with wearines redounding. For first the high palme trees with braunches faire Out of the lowly vallies did arise, And shoote up their heads into the skyes." -Virgils Gnat. MILTON, 1608-1674. Biographical Outline.-John Milton, born December 9, 1608, in Bread Street, Cheapside, London; father a scrivener-a man of scholarly and musical attainments; Milton is first taught by a private tutor, one Thomas Young; he enters St. Paul's School not later than 1620; is passionately devoted to study, reading till midnight regularly, while yet a child, and thus early injuring his eyesight; he learns Latin, Greek, French, Italian, and some Hebrew; is a poet at ten, and is devoted to Spenser's "Faery Queene;" he writes two paraphrases of the Psalms before he is fifteen; enters Christ's College, Cambridge, February 12, 1624-25, as a pensioner, and is matriculated on the 9th of the following April; he keeps every term at Cambridge, taking the degree of A.B. in March, 1629, and A.M. in July, 1632; he is harshly treated (tradition says whipped) by his tutor, one Chappel; is highly respected at the university for his scholarship; corresponds in Latin with his friends Diodati, Young, and Gill, while at Cambridge; writes several Latin poems and "Prolusiones Oratoria" (published in 1674) as college exercises; writes his ode "On the Morning of Christ's Nativity" at Christmas, 1629, and his sonnet to Shakespeare in 1630; expresses scorn for the dramatic performances seen at Cambridge, the narrow theological studies of his fellows, and their ignorance of philosophy; is nicknamed "the lady" at college because of his long, flowing locks, his personal beauty, and his sensitiveness; becomes a good fencer, but holds himself austerely aloof from most student society; develops great hostility to scholasticism. Even while at Cambridge Milton already considered himself as dedicated to the utterance of great thoughts and to the |