"Spenser" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... on Gaulish coins a sword is figured, stuck in the ground, or driving a chariot, or with a warrior dancing before it, or held in the hand of a dancing warrior.[997] The latter are ritual acts, and resemble that described by Spenser as performed by Irish warriors in his day, who said prayers or incantations before a sword stuck in the earth.[998] Swords were also addressed in songs composed by Irish bards, and traditional remains of such songs are found in Brittany.[999] ...
— The Religion of the Ancient Celts • J. A. MacCulloch
... in early boyhood he had Spenser (it is said that the first book which he bought with his own money was "The Faery Queen," for which he kept a fondness all his life), Froissart's "Chronicles," and Clarendon's "History of the Rebellion." ...
— A Study Of Hawthorne • George Parsons Lathrop
... Carlyle and Hawthorne for Matthew Arnold and, perhaps, Cardinal Newman." (Furbush was a High Churchman of a militant dye.) "What I should, of course, do would be to divide the present first term between Spenser and Milton, instead of giving it all to Shakespeare." This last was said directly to Dawson. It had been Mr. Dawson's particular joy that he could give one whole term ...
— Tutors' Lane • Wilmarth Lewis
... we passed; by merry brooks that laughed and chattered, and gurgled of love and happiness, while over all rose the swelling chorus of the birds. Surely never had they piped so gladly in this glad world before—not even for the gentle Spenser, ...
— The Broad Highway • Jeffery Farnol
... grand old countenance of Homer; the shrunken and decrepit form but vivid face of AEsop; the dark presence of Dante; the wild Ariosto; Rabelais's smile of deep-wrought mirth, the profound, pathetic humor of Cervantes; the all-glorious Shakespeare; Spenser, meet guest for an allegoric structure; the severe divinity of Milton; and Bunyan, moulded of homeliest clay, but instinct with celestial fire,—were those that chiefly attracted my eye. Fielding, Richardson, ...
— The Hall of Fantasy (From "Mosses From An Old Manse") • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... said that they brought out the brazen serpent, which Moses commanded to be kept in the ark for a memory, and offered before it. Dixon, in his 'History of the Church of England,' states that it was the universal custom in the early period of the church to demand memories to be celebrated, and Spenser's tales ...
— The Wonder Island Boys: The Tribesmen • Roger Finlay
... Spenser, by his quaint device To spiritualize the passionate, and subdue The wild, coarse temper of the British Muse, By meet diversion from the absolute: To lift the fancy, and, where still the song Proclaimed a wild humanity, to sway Soothingly soft, and by fantastic wiles Persuade the passions ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXIII No. 3 September 1848 • Various
... over the floor, under our feet! Look, I'm standing on Dickens' grave this very minute! And there's 'Oh, Rare Ben Jonson,' right there on the wall; I've always heard of that. And here's Spenser, and Chaucer, and Browning, and Tennyson, very close together. Oh! It's dreadful! I don't want to step on them! Why, everybody who ever was anybody seems to be here!" gasped John, forgetting his ...
— John and Betty's History Visit • Margaret Williamson
... of Paul Akers's creations executed during his stay in Rome are 'St. Elizabeth of Hungary,' which represents the princess at the moment the roses have fallen to the ground; 'Una and the Lion,' an illustration of the line in Spenser's 'Faerie Queene,'— ...
— Italy, the Magic Land • Lilian Whiting
... it soon appears that the embassy claiming certain French dukedoms has been despatched before they had opened their lips, and that they are urging him to a course of action on which he is resolved already. Spenser or Dryden would have escaped from the difficulty in a manner more in accordance with epic precedent by representing Henry's action as the effect of a divine vision. Edward the Third or the Black Prince would have risen ...
— The Battaile of Agincourt • Michael Drayton
... read all the fairy tales, eastern stories, and romances of knight-errantry that fell in his way. When he was about thirteen, he and a young friend used to spend hours reading together such authors as Spenser, Ariosto, and Boiardo.[73] He remembered the poems so well that weeks or months afterwards he could repeat whole pages that had particularly impressed him. Somewhat later the two boys improvised similar stories to recite to each other, Scott being the one ...
— Sir Walter Scott as a Critic of Literature • Margaret Ball
... jaws like a crocodile's, which spouted water like a whale. It lived in a fresh-water lake.[157] In the same number of the same Journal Sir George Grey gives extracts from a Maori legend of the dragon, which he compares with corresponding passages from Spenser's "Faery Queen". "Their strict verbal and poetical conformity with the New Zealand legends are such as at first to lead to the impression either that Spenser must have stolen his images and language from the New Zealand poets, or that they must have acted unfairly by the English bard" (p. 362). The ...
— The Evolution of the Dragon • G. Elliot Smith
... from Roland the noble paladin to Spenser's Red-Cross Knight, have many virtues to uphold, and their characteristics are as varied as are the races which adopted chivalry and embodied it in their hero-myths. It is a far cry from the loyalty of Roland, in which love for his emperor is the predominant characteristic, ...
— Hero-Myths & Legends of the British Race • Maud Isabel Ebbutt
... language of children. Let us suppose that the flock of winged Loves worshipping Venus in the Titian picture, and the noble child that rides his lion erect with a background of Venetian gloomy dusk, may be the inspirers of those prattlings. "See then thy selfe likewise art lyttle made," says Spenser's Venus to her child. ...
— Essays • Alice Meynell
... gray-greens and browns and soft purples and bright whites of Irish landscape, and the symbols from fairy-lore and mythology, he had paid patient heed to certain of the great poets of his language, to Spenser and Blake, to Shelley and William Morris. And in learning the art of drama, which he began to study very carefully after his early plays were tested in "The Irish Literary Theatre," Mr. Yeats has very evidently pondered ...
— Irish Plays and Playwrights • Cornelius Weygandt
... proof that Charles Lamb wrote it is to be found in a letter from Lamb to Wordsworth, now in America, dated February 1, 1806, the concluding portion of which, and the only portion that has been printed—beginning "Apropos of Spenser"—will be found in most editions of the correspondence tacked on to the letter dated June, 1806. In the earlier part of this missive Lamb enumerates the books which he has just despatched to Wordsworth ...
— Books for Children - The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Vol. 3 • Charles and Mary Lamb
... all too long, through seas unknown and dark, (With Spenser's parable I close my tale,) By shoal and rock hath steered my venturous bark, And landward now I drive before the gale. And now the blue and distant shore I hail, And nearer now I see the port expand, And now I gladly furl my weary sail, And, ...
— Some Poems by Sir Walter Scott • Sir Walter Scott
... organized by a Pageant Master, our mutual friend the dignitary. Therein Asia, King Solomon and Sheba's Queen, were represented. Africa was relegated to her proper Cinderella and Plantation Chorus part. 'Poor creatures!' Spenser said, with a ...
— Cinderella in the South - Twenty-Five South African Tales • Arthur Shearly Cripps
... translation of Rene Rapin's Reflections on Aristotle's Poesie some Reflections of his own on Epic Poets. Herein he speaks under the head Epic Poetry of Chaucer, in whose time language was not capable of heroic character; or Spenser, who "wanted a true Idea, and lost himself by following an unfaithful guide, besides using a stanza which is in no wise proper for our language;" of Sir William Davenant, who, in Gondibert, "has some strokes of an extraordinary judgment," but "is for unbeaten tracks and new ...
— The Spectator, Volume 2. • Addison and Steele
... there which reminded one of Devonshire, where the luxuriant ferns dipped their waving plumes into the cool waters of the rocky stream. In the forest, too, there were exquisite fairy-spots, where, as Spenser says, is found ...
— Round About the Carpathians • Andrew F. Crosse
... to a European reader seem a homely one. But Spenser likens an infuriate woman to a cow "That is berobbed of her youngling dere." Shakspeare also makes King Henry VI compare himself to the calf's mother that "Runs lowing up and down, Looking the way her ...
— The Ramayana • VALMIKI
... of the wonders which the classification of marine animals affords; and only drawn from one class of them, though almost as common among every other family of that submarine world whereof Spenser ...
— Glaucus; or The Wonders of the Shore • Charles Kingsley
... least for the learned of this age, the queen's vanity lay more in shining by her own learning, than in encouraging men of genius by her liberality. Spenser himself, the finest English writer of his age, was long neglected; and after the death of Sir Philip Sidney, his patron, was allowed to die almost for want. This poet contains great beauties, a sweet and harmonious versification, easy elocution, a fine imagination; yet ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part D. - From Elizabeth to James I. • David Hume
... Alberich or Albrich, a dwarf occurring in the German Nibelungenlied and other works. Etymologically Alberich is composed of alb elf and rich king. The name Oberon appears first in English literature in Lord Berners' translation of Huon of Bordeaux (c. 1534), and afterwards in Spenser[27] and in Robert Greene's play James IV, which was acted in 1589.[28] But the king of the fairies in Chaucer[29] is ...
— The Sources and Analogues of 'A Midsummer-night's Dream' • Compiled by Frank Sidgwick
... creature, my dear, her mother's main stay, and works beyond her strength, I am sure. Be kind to the poor girl, and put a little pleasure into her life if you can," answered Mrs. Spenser, as she moved about, settling comforts and ...
— A Garland for Girls • Louisa May Alcott
... Debater must have been little less surprising to any master who had merely watched him slumbering at a desk. His historical romance "The White Cockade" is immature and unimportant. But essays on Spenser, Milton, Pope, Gray, Cowper, Burns, Wordsworth, "Humour in Fiction," "Boys' Literature," Sir Walter Scott, Browning, the English Dramatists, showed a range and a quality of literary criticism alike surprising. Perhaps most surprising, ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... great English poet, Edmund Spenser, who wrote his wonderful poem, "The Faerie Queene," in the days of Queen Elizabeth, invented a great many new words. Some of these were seldom or never used afterwards, but some became ordinary English words. ...
— Stories That Words Tell Us • Elizabeth O'Neill
... Italians, he has omitted Dante, Petrarch, Ariosto, and Tasso; in his list of Spaniards, Lope and Calderon; in his list of French, Pascal, Bossuet, Moliere, Corneille, Racine, and Boileau; and in his list of English, Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare, ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 1 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... Yorkshire I discovered that while there was a hunger for poetry in the hearts of the people, the great masterpieces of our national song made little or no appeal to them. They were bidden to a feast of rarest quality and profusion, but it consisted of food that they could not assimilate. Spenser, Milton, Pope, Keats, Tennyson, all spoke to them in a language which they could not understand, and presented to them a world of thought and life in which they had no inheritance. But the Yorkshire dialect verse ...
— Songs of the Ridings • F. W. Moorman
... element. I firmly believe this chip out of the rock has been formed by successive generations of the native population, for ages placing their mouths to and drinking at this spot; but whether in connection with any sacrificial ceremonies or no, deponent knoweth, and sayeth not. The poet Spenser, more than three hundred years ago, must have visited this spot—at least, in imagination, for see ...
— Australia Twice Traversed, The Romance of Exploration • Ernest Giles
... garden until moonrise at one o'clock—we three, brother, Coleridge and I." "I read Spenser to him aloud and then ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 1 of 14 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Good Men and Great • Elbert Hubbard
... but keenly intellectual face, his large luminous eyes, his thick shock of wiry grey hair, and a little cape of faded black silk over his shoulders, he looked like an old French abbe. He was buoyant and pleasant as ever; and was busy upon a vindication of Chaucer and Spenser from Cardinal Wiseman, who had attacked them for alleged ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... records of human communities; but the time has come now—or, at the worst, is rapidly coming—when this will cease to be a fated thing. We may have a far more copious and varied tongue than had Addison or Spenser—that is no disaster—but there is no reason why we should not keep fast hold of all they had. There is no reason why the whole fine tongue of Elizabethan England should not be at our disposal still. Conceivably Addison would find the ...
— Mankind in the Making • H. G. Wells
... offspring for the strong children of mortals. The child supposed to have been left by the Fairies in the cradle, or elsewhere, was commonly called a changeling. This faith was not confined to Wales; it was as common in Ireland, Scotland, and England, as it was in Wales. Thus, in Spenser's Faery Queen, reference is made in the following ...
— Welsh Folk-Lore - a Collection of the Folk-Tales and Legends of North Wales • Elias Owen
... did harm, And his heart might be warm, For his doublet most certainly was so; And now has Torn Flooke A quieter nook Than ever had Spenser or Tasso. ...
— Citation and Examination of William Shakspeare • Walter Savage Landor
... born in London about 1553. He was graduated at Cambridge in 1576, and soon after wrote "The Shepherd's Calendar." Sir Philip Sidney and Sir Walter Raleigh were his friends and patrons. In 1598 Spenser was appointed a sheriff in Ireland, and not long afterward in a rebellion his property was destroyed and his child killed. He did not long survive this calamity. His best-known ...
— Graded Poetry: Seventh Year - Edited by Katherine D. Blake and Georgia Alexander • Various
... there is little to interest others in a recital which awakens no interest in one's self. I sought for wisdom, and I acquired but knowledge. I thirsted for the truth, the tenderness of love, and I found but its fever and its falsehood. Like the two Florimels of Spenser, I mistook, in my delirium, the delusive fabrication of the senses for the divine reality of the heart; and I only awoke from my deceit when the phantom I had worshipped melted into snow. Whatever I pursued partook of the energy, yet fitfulness of ...
— Falkland, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... 1862 Lowell edited the Atlantic Monthly, and from 1863 to 1872 the North American Review. His prose, beginning with an early volume of Conversations on Some of the Old Poets, 1844, has consisted mainly of critical essays on individual writers, such as Dante, Chaucer, Spenser, {502} Emerson, Shakespere, Thoreau, Pope, Carlyle, etc., together with papers of a more miscellaneous kind, like Witchcraft, New England Two Centuries Ago, My Garden Acquaintance, A Good Word for Winter, Abraham Lincoln, etc., etc. Two volumes of these were published ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... her that numerous poets and authors, from Edmund Spenser to many humbler craftsmen of the pen, were busy translating from the Italian the tales of Boccaccio, ...
— Penshurst Castle - In the Days of Sir Philip Sidney • Emma Marshall
... to be condemned. W. L., Gent., who in 1628 published a translation of Virgil's Eclogues, expresses his surprise that a poet like Virgil "should yet stand still as a noli me tangere, whom no man either durst or would undertake; only Master Spenser long since translated the Gnat (a little fragment of Virgil's excellence), giving the world peradventure to conceive that he would at one time or other have gone through with the rest of this poet's work."[386] ...
— Early Theories of Translation • Flora Ross Amos
... Chaldaisms, and that the Hebrew is the later Hebrew, of the days of Ezra, Nehemiah, Daniel, and Esther. It could not have been written by Solomon, any more than the "Idylls of the King" could have been written by Edmund Spenser. There are those, of course, who maintain that the book was written by Solomon; just as there are those who still maintain that the sun revolves around the earth. The reason for this opinion is found in the first sentence of the book itself. The book announces its own author, it ...
— Who Wrote the Bible? • Washington Gladden
... character of Henry Hastings; description of Digby; his Autobiography Shakespeare Sheldon, Gilbert, Archbishop of Canterbury Shrewsbury, Gilbert Talbot, Earl of Smith, Edmund Somaize, Antoine Bandeau, sieur de Somerset, Robert Ker or Carr, Earl of Sorel, Charles Spelman, Sir Henry Spenser, Edmund Sprat, Thomas, Bishop of Rochester: character of Cowley; Life of Cowley Stillingfleet, Edward, Bishop of Worcester: character by Burnet Stow, John Strada, Famiano Strafford, Thomas Wentworth, ...
— Characters from 17th Century Histories and Chronicles • Various
... Stratford-on-Avon. Then I saw the tombs of David Garrick, the great actor and delineator of Shakspeare's characters; George Frederick Handel, the eminent composer, the author of that beautiful anthem, "I know that my Redeemer liveth;" the great Milton; rare old Ben Jonson; Edmund Spenser, author of the "Faery Queene;" and those of Southey, Dryden, Addison, Gray, Campbell, and other well-known ...
— St. Nicholas, Vol. 5, No. 5, March, 1878 • Various
... vespers of every bird. There the lyric joyousness, characteristic of the Scottish people when allowed freely to develop, expanded itself to the utmost of its power and fervour. Fleurs was like the "Ida Vale" of Spenser:— ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume V. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... of his life, he dreamed of nothing but fame, and of that only for the sake of the sterling recompense it brings. Friendships not convertible to cash, Coke resolutely foreswore at the commencement of his career, and he was blessed with none at the close of it. Spenser yielded him no delight, Shakespeare no seduction. The study of law began at three in the morning, and, with short intervals of rest, ceased at nine in the evening, at which hour the indefatigable student at last took repose. Fortified by such discipline, and brim full of law, Coke was called ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 2, July, 1850. • Various
... ballad of "Hardiknute," in this collection, he knew by heart before he could read. "It was the first poem I ever learnt—the last I shall ever forget." Dr. Blacklock introduced the young schoolboy to the poems of Ossian and of Spenser, and he committed to memory "whole duans of the one and cantos of the other." "Spenser," he says, "I could have read forever. Too young to trouble myself about the allegory, I considered all the knights and ladies and dragons and ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Nineteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... to think of all this. I inclined to believe that ambition was his ruling passion, notwithstanding the description of that Hell which he showed me in Spenser. His conduct to his patron-lords, by which a surer judgment of his character could be formed than by his professions, was not, however, that of a man merely intent upon rising ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. IV • Maria Edgeworth
... I have to say is, I can't for the life of me see what you want to believe in a God for! It seems to me the world would go rather better without any such fancy. Look here now: there is young Spenser—out there at Harwood—a patient of mine. His wife died yesterday—one of the loveliest young creatures you ever saw. The poor fellow is as bad about it as fellow can be. Well, he's one of your sort, and said to me the other day, just as you would have him, 'It's the will of God,' he said, ...
— Thomas Wingfold, Curate • George MacDonald
... in a very low voice, however; and be kept well behind Bob and the girls. As for Timothy Derby and Libbie Littell they actually never heard a word of all this! They sat side by side in one of the sections and read together Spenser's Faerie Queene—understanding, it must be confessed, but an infinitesimal part of ...
— Betty Gordon at Mountain Camp • Alice B. Emerson
... men had "digged villainous saltpeter out of the bowels of the harmless earth" to manufacture powder, and others had invented cannon (S239), "those devilish iron engines," as the poet Spenser called them, "ordained to kill." Without artillery, the old feudal army, with its bows, swords, and battle-axes, could do little against a king like Henry, who had it. For this reason the whole kingdom lay at his mercy; and though the nobles and the ...
— The Leading Facts of English History • D.H. Montgomery
... war of the Angels, and the interrupted preparations for contest between Gabriel and Satan in Milton; to the contest between Apollyon and Christian in the "Pilgrim's Progress;" to some of the combats in Spenser; and to that wonderful one of the Princess and the Magician in midair in the "Arabian Nights," in order to understand the distinction between the most animated literal pictures of battle and those into which the element of imagination is strongly ...
— The Poetical Works of John Dryden, Vol II - With Life, Critical Dissertation, and Explanatory Notes • John Dryden
... whom England has produced from its first discovery down to our own times. Francis Bacon, Shakspeare, Milton, Newton, and the prodigious shoal that attended these leviathans through the intellectual deep. Newton was but in his thirteenth year at Sir Oliver's death. Raleigh, Spenser, Hooker, Elliot, Selden, Taylor, Hobbes, Sidney, Shaftesbury, and Locke, were existing in his lifetime; and several more, who may be compared with the ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXVIII. February, 1843. Vol. LIII. • Various
... the German at all that I want you. Maria has found a Spenser at last, and I am going to read her the 'Hymn of Heavenly Beauty,' I know you never can hear ...
— Deerbrook • Harriet Martineau
... sea, which at every drive rushed in through the bow-ports and over the bows, and buried all the forward part of the vessel. At this instant the chief mate, who was standing on the top of the windlass, at the foot of the spenser mast, called out, "Lay out there and furl the jib!" This was no agreeable or safe duty, yet it must be done. An old Swede, (the best sailor on board,) who belonged on the forecastle, sprang out upon the bowsprit. Another one must go: I was near the mate, ...
— Two Years Before the Mast • Richard Henry Dana
... despair of a beard; be a stateswoman, know all the news, what was done at Salisbury, what at the Bath, what at court, what in progress; or, so she may censure poets, and authors, and styles, and compare them, Daniel with Spenser, Jonson with the t'other youth, and so forth: or be thought cunning in controversies, or the very knots of divinity; and have often in her mouth the state of the question: and then skip to the mathematics, and demonstration: and answer in religion to one, in state to ...
— Epicoene - Or, The Silent Woman • Ben Jonson
... never since left ringing there; for I remember when I began to read and to take some pleasure in it, there was wont to lie in my mother's parlour (I know not by what accident, for she herself never in her life read any book but of devotion), but there was wont to lie Spenser's works." The delight in Spenser wakened all the music in him, and in 1628, in his tenth year, he wrote a "Tragical ...
— Cowley's Essays • Abraham Cowley
... life, and the habit of writing them was a useful one to him, for it forced him to think with a pen in his hand, which, according to Goethe, "if it do no other good, keeps the mind from staggering about." In these prefaces we see his taste gradually rising from Du Bartas to Spenser, from Cowley to Milton, from Corneille to Shakespeare. "I remember when I was a boy," he says in his dedication of the "Spanish Friar," 1681, "I thought inimitable Spenser a mean poet in comparison of Sylvester's Du Bartas, and was rapt into an ecstasy ...
— Among My Books - First Series • James Russell Lowell
... respectful heartiness). What! Sweet-voiced SPENSER! Chivalrous-souled SIDNEY!! This is a joy! For heroes of your kidney PUNCH hath a heartier homage, as he hopes, Than the most thundering ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 104, January 7, 1893 • Various
... in them a certain dignity, an intensity born of continuity of purpose; they are roughly hammered links in a chain of unequal workmanship, but stretching back through the centuries to the Munster poets of the days of Elizabeth, advised by Spenser to harry them out of Ireland. The names change from age to age, that is all. The verses of the seventeenth century hallow those of MacCarthys and Fitzgeralds who fought for the Stuarts or "knocked obedience out of the Gall"; the eighteenth ended with the rebels of '98; the nineteenth had Emmet ...
— The Kiltartan Poetry Book • Lady Gregory
... and Tasso. These were followed, in France, by Racine, Corneille, Boileau, Voltaire, La Fontaine and Delille; in England, by Chaucer, Spenser, Shakspeare, Milton, Dryden, Pope, Thomson, Young, Collins, Gray, Byron, Coleridge, &c; in Scotland, by Sir Walter Scott; in Ireland, by Thomas Moore; in Germany, Klopstock, ...
— A Catechism of Familiar Things; Their History, and the Events Which Led to Their Discovery • Benziger Brothers
... which had given them such dear delight in the poems of their great masters. Nay, even at this day what scholar of genial taste will not so far sympathize with them, as to read with pleasure in Petrarch, Chaucer, or Spenser, what he would perhaps condemn as puerile in ...
— English Critical Essays - Nineteenth Century • Various
... of Mr. Spenser Wilkinson in "Owens College Essays," do not convince me that Napoleon alone devised that plan. Chuquet's conclusion ("Toulon," 176), "Bonaparte partageait l'avis des representants," seems to me thoroughly sound. So, too, Cottin, "Toulon ...
— William Pitt and the Great War • John Holland Rose
... against the English capital, but in the domain of poetry, which I take to be a nation's best guaranteed stock, it may safely be said that there are but two shrines in England whither it is necessary for the literary pilgrim to carry his cockle hat and shoon—London, the birthplace of Chaucer, Spenser, Ben Jonson, Milton, Herrick, Pope, Gray, Blake, Keats, and Browning, and Stratford-upon-Avon, the birthplace of Shakespeare. Of English poets it may be said generally they are either born in London or remote country places. The large provincial towns know them not. Indeed, nothing is more pathetic ...
— Obiter Dicta - Second Series • Augustine Birrell
... won the world for her domain, Her loins brought forth, her fostering bosom fed Souls that have swept the spiritual seas From heaven to hell, and justified her crown. For round the throne of great Elizabeth Spenser and Burleigh, Sidney and Verulam, Clustered like stars, rare Jonson like the crown Of Cassiopeia, Marlowe ruddy as Mars, And over all those mighty hearts arose The soul of Shakespeare brooding far and wide Beyond our small horizons, like a light Thrown from a vaster sun that still illumes ...
— Collected Poems - Volume One (of 2) • Alfred Noyes
... Forster's "Statesmen of the Commonwealth," and a mass of literature on the Rebellion and the Protectorate. I dug deep into the literature of Evolution. I read over again all Shakespeare, Shelley, Spenser, Swift and Byron, besides a number of more modern writers. French books were not debarred, so I read Diderot, Voltaire, Paul Louis Courier, and the whole of Flaubert, including "L'Education Sentimentale," which I never attacked before, but which I found, after conquering ...
— Prisoner for Blasphemy • G. W. [George William] Foote
... If it be said that English literature—English classics, will supply the place, we deny it; for there is not an English classic of value to an artist, who was not, to his very heart's core, embued with a knowledge and love of the ancient literature. We might instance but two, Spenser and Milton—the statute-books of the better English art—authors whom, we do not hesitate to say, no one can thoroughly understand or enjoy, who has not far advanced in classical education. We shall never cease to throw out remarks of this kind, with the hope ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 54, No. 338, December 1843 • Various
... literature with so many valuable and enduring judgments on so great a variety of subjects. Dr. Johnson is by common consent the spokesman of the eighteenth century, or of its dominant class; Coleridge and Lamb are entitled to the glory of revealing the literature between Spenser and Milton to English readers, and the former rendered the additional service of acting as the interpreter of Wordsworth. But to give an idea of Hazlitt's scope would require a summary of opinions embracing poetry ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... just the reverse of the other. It has been the fashion of late to cry up our author's poems, as equal to his plays: this is the desperate cant of modern criticism. We would ask, was there the slightest comparison between Shakespeare, and either Chaucer or Spenser, as mere poets? Not any.- -The two poems of VENUS AND ADONIS and of TARQUIN AND LUCRECE appear to us like a couple of ice-houses. They are about as hard, as glittering, and as cold. The author seems all the time to be thinking of his verses, and not of his subject,—not of what ...
— Characters of Shakespeare's Plays • William Hazlitt
... Marcus Aurelius was a Romanized Spaniard, Plotinus possibly a Copt, Porphyry and Lucian Syrians, Philo, St. Paul, and probably the Fourth Evangelist were Jews. These men all belong to the history of Greek culture. And if these were Greeks how shall we deny the name to Raphael and Michael Angelo, to Spenser and Sidney, to Keats ...
— The Legacy of Greece • Various
... "Roman de la Rose," was in some ways the most extraordinary of all. In France, this work remained the dominant work of poetic literature, and "the source whence every rhymer drew for his needs" down to the period of the classical revival led by Ronsard (when it was edited by Clement Marot, Spenser's early model). In England, it exercised an influence only inferior to that which belonged to it at home upon both the matter and the form of poetry down to the renascence begun by Surrey and Wyatt. This extraordinary literary influence admits of a double ...
— Chaucer • Adolphus William Ward
... Celtic origin (Welsh crwth) and a doublet of the archaic crowd, or crowth, a fiddle. Both rote and crowth are used by Spenser. Crowd is perhaps not yet obsolete in dialect, and the fiddler in Hudibras is called Crowdero. Thus Rutter may be a doublet of Crowther. There may be other possible etymologies for Rutter, but those discussed will suffice to show that the origin ...
— The Romance of Names • Ernest Weekley
... wappen'd widow wed again] Of wappened I have found no example, nor know any meaning. To awhape is used by Spenser in his Hubberd's Tale, but I think not in either of the senses mentioned. I would read wained, for decayed by time. So our author in Richard the Third, ...
— Notes to Shakespeare, Volume III: The Tragedies • Samuel Johnson
... Angelina, there comes to me the picture of the spotless dove in the tempest, as she battles with the storm, seeking for some place to rest her foot. She reminds me of innocence personified in Spenser's poem. In her girlhood, alone, heart-led, she comforts the slave in his quarters, mentally struggling with the problems his position wakes her to. Alone, not confused, but seeking something to lean on, ...
— The Grimke Sisters - Sarah and Angelina Grimke: The First American Women Advocates of - Abolition and Woman's Rights • Catherine H. Birney
... example of his own theory. He read Polybius, with a notion of his historic exactness, before he was ten years old. Witnesses rise over the whole field of learning. Pope, at twelve, feasted his eyes in the picture-galleries of Spenser. Murillo filled the margin of his school-books with drawings. Le Brun, in the beginning of childhood, drew with a piece of charcoal on the walls of the house. The young Ariosto quietly watched the fierce gestures of his ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 433 - Volume 17, New Series, April 17, 1852 • Various
... splendid tribute to a friend; while an irrational prejudice against another called out a terrific diatribe against a foe. In either case, there might be "thoughts that breathe and words that burn"; still, there was but little of true criticism. The matchless papers on Spenser and Homer represent one class, and the articles on Hazlitt and Leigh Hunt the other. While the former exhibit the tender sympathy of a poet and the enthusiasm of a scholar, the latter reveal the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 11, No. 65, March, 1863 • Various
... Chaucer for strength," he advises Stoddard on January 7, 1850, "read Spenser for ease and sweetness, read Milton for sublimity and thought, read Shakespeare for all these things, and for something else which is his alone. Get out of your age ...
— Representative Plays by American Dramatists: 1856-1911: Francesca da Rimini • George Henry Boker
... you Spenser; perhaps you had better begin with the Hymn to Beauty, page 39, and then go on to the Tears; but you'll see how you like it. It's better than ...
— Hortus Inclusus - Messages from the Wood to the Garden, Sent in Happy Days - to the Sister Ladies of the Thwaite, Coniston • John Ruskin
... Wilberforce, among statesmen; of soldiers there are Prince Rupert and Monk; of Indian fame, here are Lord Lawrence and Lord Clyde; of sailors, Blake, Cloudesley Shovel, and Lord Dundonald. Of poets, Chaucer, Spenser, Beaumont, Ben Jonson, Dryden, Prior, Addison, Gay, Campbell. Of historians and prose writers, Samuel Johnson, Macaulay, Dickens, Livingston, Isaac Newton. Many others there are to look for, notably the great poet Tennyson, ...
— The History of London • Walter Besant
... course, is at the opposite pole of the poet's genius. A few plain verses of the Odyssey, almost bald in their reticence, are the point de repere of the most magical vision expressed in the most musical verse. Here is the languid charm of Spenser, enriched with many classical memories, and pictures of natural beauty gorgeously yet delicately painted. After the excision of some verses, rather fantastical, in 1842, the poem became a flawless masterpiece,—one of ...
— Alfred Tennyson • Andrew Lang
... under Heaven so strongly doth allure The sense of man, and all his mind possess, As Beauty's love-bait.—SPENSER. ...
— Alice, or The Mysteries, Book VII • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... folklore are far greater than and of a different kind from those of history. Edmund Spenser wrote three centuries ago "by these old customs the descent of nations can only be proved where other monuments of writings are not remayning,"[3] and yet the descent of nations is still being proved without the aid ...
— Folklore as an Historical Science • George Laurence Gomme
... of a woman, or rather of a girl, who seeks to give a grace to the commonest things around her. With the mechanical habit of a student, Leonard took down one or two of the volumes still left on the shelves. He found SPENSER'S Fairy Queen, RACINE in French, TASSO in Italian; and on the fly-leaf of each volume, in the exquisite hand-writing familiar to his memory, the name "Leonora." He kissed the books, and replaced them with a feeling akin both ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 2, No. 12, May, 1851. • Various
... attributes, made him an allegorical representation of one of the most fiendish forms of unmixed evil, so that we welcome his destruction with something of the same feeling with which, in following the allegory of Spenser or Bunyan, we rejoice in the hero's victory over the Blatant Beast or Giant Despair. Conceding, however, that Donatello's act was murder, and not "justifiable homicide," we are still not sure that the author's conception of his nature and of the change caused in his nature by that ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 31, May, 1860 • Various
... old wine pours, streaming o'er the leaves, And down the symbol-carved sides. Behold! Unbidden, yet most welcome, who be these? The high-priests of this altar, poet-kings;— Chaucer, still young with silvery beard that seems Worthy the adoration of a child; And Spenser, perfect master, to whom all Sweet graces ministered. The shut eye weaves A picture;—the immortals pass along Into the heaven, and others follow still, Each on his own ray-path, till all the field ...
— The Germ - Thoughts towards Nature in Poetry, Literature and Art • Various
... arrival in Ireland, the name of Raleigh ceased to be obscure. Sir William Pelham retired on September 7, and Lord Grey, who had brought the newly famous poet, Edmund Spenser, with him as his secretary, marched into Munster. With his exploits we have nothing to do, save to notice that it must have been in the camp at Rakele, if not on the battle-field of Glenmalure, that Raleigh ...
— Raleigh • Edmund Gosse
... writers, unless we except Rabelais, appear in the latter half of the sixteenth century—Tasso and Camoens and Cervantes, [Footnote: Don Quixote did not appear till 1605; but Cervantes was then nearly sixty.] Spenser and Marlowe and Shakespeare, as well as Montaigne. But even in the first half of the century, Copernicus enunciated the new theory that the Sun, not the Earth, is the centre of the astronomical system; and before the end of our period, ...
— England Under the Tudors • Arthur D. Innes
... the arts and sciences, and concludes that the moderns are equal to the ancients in poetry, and in almost all other things excel them. [Footnote: Among modern poets equal to the ancients, Hakewill signalises Sir Philip Sidney, Spenser, Marot, Ronsard, Ariosto, Tasso (Book iii. chap. ...
— The Idea of Progress - An Inquiry Into Its Origin And Growth • J. B. Bury
... couplet may be divided into two periods, that of Chaucer and his followers, Gavin Douglas and Spenser, and that beginning with Marlowe, Chapman, and other Elizabethans and continuing down to the present. This division is peculiar, for it represents a double curve of development, the one comparatively short, the other long. ...
— The Principles of English Versification • Paull Franklin Baum
... dare to say so) by some works of our own time—for instance, by the "Vale of Rest," the "Autumn Leaves," "The Huguenot" of young Mr. Millais—just as I found such poems as Maud and In Memoriam, by Mr. Alfred Tennyson, infinitely more precious and dear to me than Milton's Paradise Lost and Spenser's ...
— Peter Ibbetson • George du Marier et al
... melodious lays Which softly melt the ages through, The songs of Spenser's golden days, Arcadian Sidney's silvery phrase, Sprinkling our noon of time with ...
— Selections From American Poetry • Various
... II. Spenser III. Spenser's immediate followers IV. The regular eclogists V. Lyrical and occasional verse VI. Milton's Lycidas and Browne's Britannia's Pastorals ...
— Pastoral Poetry and Pastoral Drama - A Literary Inquiry, with Special Reference to the Pre-Restoration - Stage in England • Walter W. Greg
... to Spenser, I must acknowledge that there is scarcely a poet in the language could have been a more agreeable present to me; and in justice to you, allow me to say, Sir, that I have not met with a man in Edinburgh to whom I would so willingly have been indebted for the gift. The tattered ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... Addison's "Spectator," its near neighbor Steele; the "Gentleman's Magazine," a long run this, but not complete; rare Ben Jonson, rubbed at the joints; Spenser's "Faerie Queen," with marginal notes in a contemporary hand; the "History of the Valorous and Witty Knight Errant," in sable morocco, with armorial decorations; Tacitus in all his atrocity, ...
— Old Valentines - A Love Story • Munson Aldrich Havens
... with the seeing, touching, and handling pleasures of the old Chrysophilites. A bank-note can no more satisfy the touch of a true sensualist in this passion, than Creusa could return her husband's embrace in the shades. See the Cave of Mammon in Spenser; Barabas's contemplation of his wealth, in the Rich Jew of Malta; Luke's raptures in the City Madam; the idolatry and absolute gold-worship of the miser Jaques in this early comic production of Ben Jonson's. Above ...
— The Works of Charles Lamb in Four Volumes, Volume 4 • Charles Lamb
... fall on the neck and kiss when we come together." It is true that this ancient and universal custom has vanished with the modern weakening of England. Sydney would have thought nothing of kissing Spenser. But I willingly concede that Mr. Broderick would not be likely to kiss Mr. Arnold-Foster, if that be any proof of the increased manliness and military greatness of England. But the Englishman who does not show his feelings has not altogether given up the power of ...
— Heretics • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... best of the younger English artists—I am sorry there is nothing by Stanley Spenser, Wyndham Lewis, Bomberg or Roberts—are confronted by a handful of their French contemporaries. They are not confronted by the best of them: Mr. Fry has hung nothing by Matisse, Bonnard or Picasso, for instance, though, had he pleased, he could have shown a couple ...
— Pot-Boilers • Clive Bell
... well grounded in French and Latin. For Greek and mathematics he had an aversion, but made up for this deficiency by considerable acquisitions in English literature. He was delighted with both Ossian and Spenser, and could repeat the "Faerie Queene" by heart. His memory, like that of Macaulay, was remarkable. What delighted him more than Spenser were Hoole's translations of Tasso and Ariosto (later he learned Italian, and ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XIII • John Lord
... the library, although it did not advance with the same steadiness as before. One day, in listless mood, I took up a volume, without knowing what it was, or what I sought. It opened at the Amoretti of Edmund Spenser. I was on the point of closing it again, when a line caught my eye. I read the sonnet; read another; found I could understand them perfectly; and that hour the poetry of the sixteenth century, hitherto ...
— The Portent & Other Stories • George MacDonald
... that the tories of the time of Cromwell and Charles the Second were but the lineal descendants of the thievish wood kernes mentioned by Spenser, or at least the inheritors of their habits. Defoe attributes the establishment of the word in England to the ...
— The Evil Eye; Or, The Black Spector - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton
... constant swain and doom him to perish miserably for love of her. Beware of the fountains and of the wells of this forest of Broceliande, for there she is most commonly to be encountered, and you may know her by her bright hair—"like golden wire," as Spenser says of his lady's—her red, flashing eyes, and her laughing lips. But if you would dare her wiles you must come alone to her fountain by night, for she shuns even the half-gloom that is day in shadowy Broceliande. The peasants when they speak of her will assure you that ...
— Legends & Romances of Brittany • Lewis Spence
... us that Spenser was his master, and the full charm of Comus cannot be realised without reference to the artistic and philosophical spirit of the author of the Faerie Queene. Both poems deal with the war between the body and the soul—between the lower and the higher nature. In an essay on 'Spenser as a philosophic ...
— Milton's Comus • John Milton
... at thirty-two is described by Mark Antony after the battle of Actium as the 'boy Caesar' who 'wears the rose of youth' (Antony and Cleopatra, III., ii., 17 seq.). Spenser in his Astrophel apostrophizes Sir Philip Sidney on his death near the close of his thirty-second year as 'oh wretched boy' (l. 133) and 'luckless boy' ...
— Testimony of the Sonnets as to the Authorship of the Shakespearean Plays and Poems • Jesse Johnson
... character of the whole. Then, in details, there, on stout oak shelves, were the books on which my father loved to jest his more imaginative brother; there they were,—Froissart, Barante, Joinville, the Mort d'Arthur, Amadis of Gaul, Spenser's Faerie Queene, a noble copy of Strutt's Horda, Mallet's Northern Antiquities, Percy's Reliques, Pope's Homer, books on gunnery, archery, hawking, fortification; old chivalry and ...
— The Caxtons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... Satirday in the myddes of August he scomfited Simon of Mountford at Kelyngworth. And on the Wednesday nest after was the batall of Evesham; and there was sclayn Simond of Mountford erle of Leycestre, the lord Spenser, S^{r}. Rauff Bassett, S^{r}. Thomas Asteley, William Maundevyle, S^{r}. John Beauchamp, S^{r}. Guy Bailliof, S^{r}. Roger Roule, &c. and the ...
— A Chronicle of London from 1089 to 1483 • Anonymous
... were on other things. "The other day, during a lecture," he said to a friend, "there came a sunbeam into the room, and with it a whole troop of creatures floating in the ray; and I was off with them to Oberon and fairyland." A copy of Spenser's Faery Queen, which had been given him by Charles Cowden Clark, was the prime cause of his abstraction. He abandoned his profession in 1817, and early in the same year published his first volume of Poems. It was modest enough in spirit, as ...
— English Literature - Its History and Its Significance for the Life of the English Speaking World • William J. Long
... whose music re-echoes through many pages of English literature, especially in the poems of Spenser, ...
— Mysticism in English Literature • Caroline F. E. Spurgeon
... of such poets as Thomson and Cowper would disappear, Wordsworth's pages would show fearful gaps, and Keats would be in risk of summary suppression. We may doubt whether much would be left of Spenser, from whom both Keats and Pope, like so many other of our poets, drew inspiration in their youth. Fairyland would be deserted, and the poet condemned to working upon ordinary commonplaces in broad daylight. The principle which Pope proclaimed ...
— Hours in a Library, Volume I. (of III.) • Leslie Stephen
... battle of Ramilles is necessarily tedious by the form of the stanza: an uniform mass of ten lines, thirty-five times repeated, inconsequential and slightly connected, must weary both the ear and the understanding. His imitation of Spenser, which consists principally in I ween and I weet, without exclusion of later modes of speech, makes his poem neither ancient nor modern. His mention of Mars and Bellona, and his comparison of Marlborough to ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D. in Nine Volumes - Volume the Eighth: The Lives of the Poets, Volume II • Samuel Johnson
... dread of hurt would him advise, The angry beastes not rashly to despise, Nor too much to provoke; for he would learne The lion stoup to him in lowly wise, (A lesson hard,) and make the libbard sterne Leave roaring, when in rage he for revenge did earne.—SPENSER. ...
— A Legend of Montrose • Sir Walter Scott
... wheresoe'er it be, Whether in earth laid up in secret store, Or else in heav'n, that no man may it see With sinful eyes, for feare it to deflore, Is perfect Beautie.—SPENSER. ...
— A Theodicy, or, Vindication of the Divine Glory • Albert Taylor Bledsoe
... against Catiline and against Antony, the author of the disputations at Tusculum and the orations against Verres. Cicero was ever to him the mightiest of the ancient names. In English literature Milton seems to have been more familiar to him than Shakespeare, and Spenser was perhaps more of a ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... oxy blepon].—Plato's epithets in first book of the Laws.) Still more does this Dantesque type differ from the resplendent Plutus of Goethe in the second part of Faust, who is the personified power of wealth for good or evil—not the passion for wealth; and again from the Plutus of Spenser, who is the passion of mere aggregation. Dante's Plutus is specially and definitely the Spirit of Contention and Competition, or Evil Commerce; because, as I showed before, this kind of commerce "makes all men strangers;" his speech is therefore ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... was locked in the bosom of futurity. The young Hawthorne, therefore, like many of his contemporaries, was constrained to amuse himself, for want of anything better, with the Pilgrim's Progress and the Faery Queen. A boy may have worse company than Bunyan and Spenser, and it is very probable that in his childish rambles our author may have had associates of whom there could be no record. When he was nine years old he met with an accident at school which threatened for a while to have serious results. He was struck on the foot by a ...
— Hawthorne - (English Men of Letters Series) • Henry James, Junr.
... plan of these volumes does not encourage footnotes, I wish to say that, besides the biographies prefixed to the various editions of Spenser, there are two series of publications, which have been very useful to me. One is the series of Calendars of State Papers, especially the State Papers on Ireland and the Carew MSS. at Lambeth, with the prefaces of Mr. Hans Claude Hamilton and the late Professor Brewer. The other is Mr. E. Arber's ...
— Spenser - (English Men of Letters Series) • R. W. Church
... instances in which the element of setting is used for a decorative purpose, and is brought into an artistic relation with the elements of action and character. Such a use is made of landscape, for example, in the "Orlando Furioso" of Ariosto and the "Faerie Queene" of Spenser. The settings depicted by these narrative poets are essentially pictorial, and are used as a decorative background to the action rather than as part and parcel of it. If we seek an example in prose rather ...
— A Manual of the Art of Fiction • Clayton Hamilton
... and even corrupted their language, by throwing out the guttural sounds, altering the pronunciation and the quantity, and disusing many words and terms of great significance. In consequence of these innovations, the works of our best poets, such as Chaucer, Spenser, and even Shakespeare, were become, in many parts, unintelligible to the natives of South Britain, whereas the Scots, who retain the antient language, understand them without the help of a glossary. 'For instance (said he), how have ...
— The Expedition of Humphry Clinker • Tobias Smollett
... and power, the keen zest for learning which filled the air that men breathed, and it is easy to understand that the time was ripe for a new and brilliant epoch in literature. First among the poetic geniuses of the Elizabethan period came Edmund Spenser with his Faerie Queene, the allegory of an ...
— Spenser's The Faerie Queene, Book I • Edmund Spenser
... which would have the effect of putting his young nurse and himself upon more open and intimate terms. He looked forward to this culmination with impatience, and yet with anxiety. One morning, when they had been reading Spenser's "Faerie Queene," Cornelia's weekly letter was brought in, and subsequently the ...
— Bressant • Julian Hawthorne
... the military history of the Civil War the author is specially indebted to "The Civil War in the United States," by W. Birkbeck Wood and Major J. E. Edmonds, R.E., with an introduction by Spenser Wilkinson: Methuen & Co., London, and Putnam, New York, which is the only concise and complete history of the war written with full knowledge of all recent works bearing on the subject. Mr. Nicolay's chapters in the "Cambridge Modern History" give a very ...
— Abraham Lincoln • Lord Charnwood
... legitimate credulity is directly noxious to the effect of the poem; it puts us back one stage further from the point of absolute faith, and materially diminishes the interest which we take in the progress of the piece. Spenser's Faerie Queen is a notable example of this. Could we but think that Una was intended, though only by the poet's fancy, to be the portraiture of a mortal virgin, unfriended and alone amidst the snares and enchantments of the world, would we not tremble for her sweet sake, knowing that some as innocent ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 379, May, 1847 • Various
... lady, by inheritance, of the signory. The female feudatories exercised all the duties and honours of their feudal jurisdiction in person. In Spenser, where we read of the Lady of the Castle, we are to understand such a character. See a story of a Comtesse, who entertains a knight in her castle with much gallantry. (Mem. sur l'Anc. Chev., ii. 69.) It is well known that anciently in England ...
— Notes and Queries, No. 179. Saturday, April 2, 1853. • Various
... up in which woman was set forth no longer as the weakling and the temptress, but as the guide and the inspirer of man. Whatever traces of the old foul leaven may be found in Beaumont and Fletcher, Massinger, or Ben Jonson, such books as Sidney's 'Arcadia,' Lyly's 'Euphues,' Spenser's 'Fairy Queen,' and last, but not least, Shakespeare's Plays, place the conception of woman and of the rights of woman on a vantage-ground from which I believe it can never permanently fall again—at least until (which ...
— Women and Politics • Charles Kingsley
... investments. The King having come to his own again, Butler obtained permission in November 1662 to print the first part of 'Hudibras.' The quaint title of this poem has attracted much curious cavil. The name is used by Milton, Spenser, and Robert of Gloucester for an early king of Britain, the grandfather of King Lear; and by Ben Jonson—from whom Butler evidently adopted it—for a swaggering fellow in the ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 7 • Various
... teachers. He studied all classic literature. "The AEschylean drama had no attraction for him; he reveled in the rich and elegant strains of Virgil, and of the many toned lyre of Horace and the silver lute of Catullus." From the full and inexhaustible fountain of English letters he drank unceasingly. Spenser, Shakespeare, Milton, Burns, Wordsworth, and, later, Tennyson were his ...
— Poems of Henry Timrod • Henry Timrod
... that Homer, or any of the eternal poets should have so far misunderstood themselves as to have abdicated this throne of their widest dominion. Those in whom the poetical faculty, though great, is less intense, as Euripides, Lucan, Tasso, Spenser, have frequently affected a moral aim, and the effect of their poetry is diminished in exact proportion to the degree in which they compel us to advert ...
— A Defence of Poetry and Other Essays • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... paraphrase of Fontenelle's), and in opposition to the school of Rapin, Pope, and Gay, who argued for a portrait of the Golden Age. Both schools campaigned for a simplicity removed from realistic rusticity (which they detected in Spenser and Theocritus) and refinement (as in Virgil's eclogues); but to one group the term meant the innocence of those remote from academic learning and social sophistication, and to the other the refined simplicity ...
— A Full Enquiry into the Nature of the Pastoral (1717) • Thomas Purney
... in nature is unbeautiful" [Tennyson]; "silently as a dream the fabric rose" [Cowper]; "some touch of nature's genial glow" [Scott]; "this majestical roof fretted with golden fire" [Hamlet]; "through knowledge we behold the World's creation" [Spenser]. ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... pupils had on the whole a decidedly pleasant time. There were just enough of them to develop the community spirit, but not too many to obliterate the individual, or, as Ida Spenser put it: "You can get up a play, or a dance, or any other sort of fun, and yet we all know each other like a kind ...
— The Princess of the School • Angela Brazil
... leader, around whom other contemporary writers may be grouped. In Great Britain the several and successive periods might thus be well designated by such authors as Geoffrey Chaucer or John Wiclif, Thomas More or Henry Howard, Edmund Spenser or Sir Walter Raleigh, William Shakspere or Francis Bacon, John Milton or Jeremy Taylor, John Dryden or John Locke, Joseph Addison or Joseph Butler, Samuel Johnson or Oliver Goldsmith, William Cowper or John Wesley, Walter Scott or Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Wordsworth or Thomas Chalmers, ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... to the exact relation of the chivalry of Europe to the earlier chivalry of Arabia and of the East is a large one, and one which must be left to scholars. It is certain that Spenser and Sir Philip Sidney owe far more to Saladin than we commonly suppose. The tales of Boccaccio (1350) show that the Italians of that day still held the Arabs to be their teachers in chivalry, and at least their equals in art, science, and civilization; and the ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 2 • Charles Dudley Warner
... easily conceive the emphatic indifference, if my conjecture be well founded, with which Lord Byron must have said to him, "I have occasionally written short poems, besides a great many stanzas in Spenser's measure, relative to the countries I have visited: they are not worth troubling you with, but you shall have them all ...
— The Life of Lord Byron • John Galt
... 166.] thinks that, next to Catullus, he was the most poetical of his countrymen. Milton thinks he could have surpassed Virgil had he attempted epic poetry. He was nearest to the romantic school of all the classical authors, and Chaucer, Ariosto, and Spenser owe to him great obligations. Like Pope, his verses flowed spontaneously. His "Tristia" were more admired by the Romans than his "Amores" or "Metamorphoses,"—probably from the doleful description ...
— The Old Roman World • John Lord
... refreshment in sleep, while the mind, like a barque without rudder or compass, drifts aimlessly upon an uncharted sea. But curiously enough, these fantasies and inter-twistings of thought are to be found in great imaginative poems like Spenser's "Faerie Queene." Lamb was impressed by the analogy between our dream-thinking and the work of the imagination. Speaking of the episode in the cave ...
— The World I Live In • Helen Keller
... calumets and buried hatchets. Then they waited for my contribution of honeyed words. The Pamunkeys, living at a distance from the settlements, had but little English, and the learning of the Paspaheghs was not much greater. I repeated to them the better part of a canto of Master Spenser's Faery Queen, after which I told them the moving story of the Moor of Venice. It answered the ...
— The Literary World Seventh Reader • Various
... Fouque, one of the foremost of the minstrels or tale-tellers of the realm of spiritual chivalry—the realm whither Arthur's knights departed when they "took the Sancgreal's holy quest,"—whence Spenser's Red Cross knight and his fellows came forth on their adventures, and in which the Knight of la Mancha ...
— Undine - I • Friedrich de la Motte Fouque
... ingenuity" was Marinus, whose epic "Adone," in twenty cantos, dilates on the tale of Venus and Adonis. He also wrote "Gerusalemme Distrutta" and "La Strage degl' Innocenti," and his poetry is said to have much of the charm of Spenser's. ...
— The Book of the Epic • Helene A. Guerber
... they enter, where they found The accursed man low sitting on the ground, Musing full sadly in his sullen mind. SPENSER. ...
— Old Mortality, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... stanzas of varying, but in each case uniform, length, and every stanza corresponds precisely in metrical arrangement with every other stanza in the same canzone. In English the Epithalamion and the Prothalamion of Spenser (except for their refrain) do exactly what Petrarch had done in Italian; and whatever further analogy there may be between the spirit of Patmore's writing and that of Spenser in these two poems, ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... not disdain the image "fair as the moon, clear as the sun," and those who have seen a moon in the sky of Arabia will thoroughly appreciate it. We find it amongst the Hindus, the Persians, the Afghans, the Turks and all the nations of Europe. We have, finally, the grand example of Spenser, ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 4 • Richard F. Burton
... and ennobled by the sweet spirit of the Christian religion. We see the conversion of England in the very process of its accomplishment. We see the beauties of Paganism and those of Christianity blending with each other, much as the Medieval and the Renaissance are blended in Spenser. In the one aspect Andrew is the valiant hero, like Beowulf, crossing the sea to accomplish a mighty deed of deliverance; in the other he is the saintly confessor, the patient sufferer, whose whole ...
— Andreas: The Legend of St. Andrew • Unknown
... Edward Roth—whom James Huneker celebrates in his "Steeplejack"—named Spenser as "the poet of the poets"; but Spenser is too hard to read—even harder than Chaucer, and certainly more involved, while no poets that ever lived can make pictures so glowing, so full of a sensitive and exquisite light as Keats. Later, it seemed absurd ...
— Confessions of a Book-Lover • Maurice Francis Egan
... philological records, but in the light of poetical productions, cannot be said to hold a very distinguished place in English literature. The poems in the present volume contain many passages which, as Sir F. Madden truly remarks, will bear comparison with any similar ones in the works of Douglas or Spenser. ...
— Early English Alliterative Poems - in the West-Midland Dialect of the Fourteenth Century • Various
... triplets. Michael Angelo allows himself three rhymes, while Campanella usually confines himself to two. My practice has been to study in each sonnet the cadence both of thought and diction, so as to satisfy an English ear, accustomed to the various forms of termination exemplified by Spenser, Milton, Wordsworth, and Rossetti—the sweetest, the most sublime, the least artificial, and the most artful sonnet-writers ...
— Sonnets • Michael Angelo Buonarroti & Tommaso Campanella
... Chaucer, or even Spenser, as a modern, appears to them inexpressibly ridiculous; and all the rich and varied eloquence of Italy, from Dante to Monti, is about as much known to them, as the Welsh effusions of ...
— Domestic Manners of the Americans • Fanny Trollope
... dost armes professe, And through long labours huntest after fame, Beware of fraud, beware of ficklenesse, In choice and change of thy beloved dame. Spenser, FAERY QUEENE ...
— The Chaplet of Pearls • Charlotte M. Yonge
... acquired a wide knowledge of English poetry. Waller, Spenser, and Dryden were, he says, his great favourites in the order named, till he was twelve. Like so many other poets, he took infinite delight in the Faery Queen; but Dryden, the great poetical luminary of his own day, naturally exercised a predominant influence ...
— Alexander Pope - English Men of Letters Series • Leslie Stephen
... I read Morley's History of English Literature ... Chaucer all through ... Spenser ... even Gower's Confessio Amantis and Lydgate's ballads ... my recent discovery of Chatterton having made me ...
— Tramping on Life - An Autobiographical Narrative • Harry Kemp
... identical with Agnes, in the beautiful romance which Mrs. Stowe has lately contributed to this magazine: the difference is in time and circumstance, and not in essential nature. The Puritan maiden, with all her homely culture and rough surroundings, is really as poetic a personage as any of Spenser's exquisite individualizations of abstract feminine excellence; perhaps more so, as the most austere and exalted spiritualities of Christianity enter into the constitution of her nature, and her soul ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 57, July, 1862 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... the death of Gavaston, was Hugh le Despenser, or Spenser, a young man of English birth, of high rank, and of a noble family.[*] He possessed all the exterior accomplishments of person and address which were fitted to engage the weak mind of Edward; but was destitute of that moderation and prudence which ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part B. - From Henry III. to Richard III. • David Hume
... upon God's bare word is ever finally disappointed. From all other anticipations grounded on anything less solid, the element of uncertainty is inseparable, and Fear is ever the sister of Hope. With keen insight Spenser makes these two march side by side, in his wonderful procession of the attendants of earthly Love. There is always a lurking sadness in Hope's smiles, and a nameless dread in her eyes. And all expectations busied with or based upon the contingencies of this poor life, whether they are fulfilled ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus and Numbers • Alexander Maclaren
... Osborne contribute, and nothing loth (for he was as free-handed a young fellow as any in the army), he went to Bond Street, and bought the best hat and spenser that money could buy. ...
— Vanity Fair • William Makepeace Thackeray
... not understand this; it could not have been Spenser's "Faerie Queene," so we walked on to the Fairy Cross without seeing either the Queen or the Fairy, although we were fortunate to find what might be described as a Fairy Glen and to reach the old Castle of Restormel, which had thus ...
— From John O'Groats to Land's End • Robert Naylor and John Naylor
... which developed itself in Ariosto, in Tasso, in the Hypnerotomachia, the Arcadia, the Euphues, and other forms, sometimes fantastic, sometimes questionable, but which reached its perfection in our own Spenser's "Fairy Queen"— perhaps the most admirable poem which has ever been penned ...
— Sanitary and Social Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley
... writing, Pope was my favorite poet. His wit and common sense appealed to me. Young's "Night Thoughts" also struck me as very grand. Whipple seemed to me a much greater writer than Emerson. Shakespeare I did not come to appreciate till years later, and Chaucer and Spenser I have never learned ...
— Our Friend John Burroughs • Clara Barrus
... modern spirit assumed externally such diverse forms as made them reciprocally repellent. Only one European nation received both impulses simultaneously. That was England, which adopted Protestantism and produced the literature of Spenser, Bacon, and Shakespeare at the same epoch. France, earlier than England, felt Renaissance influences, and for some while seemed upon the point of joining the Reformation. But while the French were hesitating, ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds
... a certain number of French phrases that custom has declared shall take the place of that "pure English undefiled" whereof Spenser wrote. In a few cases these chance to be shorter, more euphonious, and more directly to the point than the corresponding English phrase. For instance, the word "chaperon," so important in its signification at the present, has no adequate English translation. Below is given an alphabetical ...
— Social Life - or, The Manners and Customs of Polite Society • Maud C. Cooke
... written in 1785 or the beginning of 1786. In all English poetry there are few pictures of home life so charming as that portrayed in this poem. The stanza employed is the Spenserian stanza, named for Edmund Spenser, who first used it. The first eight lines have five feet each, while the last ...
— Selections from Five English Poets • Various
... helping of salt beef along with much cogitation concerning her mistress's singular ways. Still, she could not restrain a supposition that the latter must have supposed the priest to speak to her, when she heard the Earl say, "I hear from Geoffrey Spenser, [Note 2], that our stock of salt ling is beyond what is like to be wanted. Methinks the villeins might have a cade or two thereof, ...
— A Forgotten Hero - Not for Him • Emily Sarah Holt
... path has walked along, That noble, bold, and glorious politician, That mighty prince of everlasting song! That bard of heaven, earth, chaos, and perdition! Poor hapless Spenser, too, that sweet musician Of faery land, Has crossed thee, mourning o'er his sad condition, And leaning upon sorrow's outstretched hand. Oft, haply, has great Newton o'er thee stalked So much entranced, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. XX. No. 557., Saturday, July 14, 1832 • Various |
