_Their_ birth was of the womb of morning dew,
And _their_ conception of the glorious prime.
Among the minor poems of Spenser the most delightful were his
_Prothalamion_ and _Epithalamion_. The first was a "spousal verse," made
for the double wedding of the Ladies Catherine and Elizabeth Somerset,
whom the poet figures as two white swans that come swimming down the
Thames, the surface of which the nymphs strew with lilies, till it
appears "like a bride's chamber-floor."
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.
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