And if a sullen cloud, as sad as night, In which the sun may seem embodiéd, Depured of all his dross, we see so white, Burning in melted gold his watery head, Or round with ivory edges silvered; What lustre super-excellent will he Lighten on those that shall his sunshine see In that all-glorious court in which all glories be! These brothers were intense admirers of Spenser. To be like him Phineas must write an allegory; and such an allegory! Of all the strange poems in existence, surely this is the strangest. The _Purple Island_ is man, whose body is anatomically described after the allegory of a city, which is then peopled with all the human faculties personified, each set in motion by itself. They say the anatomy is correct: the metaphysics are certainly good. The action of the poem is just another form of the _Holy War_ of John Bunyan--all the good and bad powers fighting for the possession of the Purple Island. What renders the conception yet more amazing is the fact that the whole ponderous mass of anatomy and metaphysics, nearly as long as the _Paradise Lost_, is put as a song, in a succession of twelve cantos, in the mouth of a shepherd, who begins a canto every morning to the shepherds and shepherdesses of the neighbourhood, and finishes it by folding-time in the evening. And yet the poem is full of poetry. He triumphs over his difficulties partly by audacity, partly by seriousness, partly by the enchantment of song. But the poem will never be read through except by students of English literature. It is a whole; its members are well-fitted; it is full of beauties--in parts they swarm like fire-flies; and _yet_ it is not a good poem. It is like a well-shaped house, built of mud, and stuck full of precious stones. I do not care, in my limited space, to quote from it. Never was there a more incongruous dragon of allegory. Both brothers were injured, not by their worship of Spenser, but by the form that worship took--imitation. They seem more pleased to produce a line or stanza that shall recall a line or stanza of Spenser, than to produce a fine original of their own. They even copy lines almost word for word from their great master. This is pure homage: it was their delight that such adaptations should be recognized--just as it was Spenser's hope, when he inserted translated stanzas from Tasso's _Jerusalem Delivered_ in _The Fairy Queen_, to gain the honour of a true reproduction. Yet, strange fate for imitators! both, but Giles especially, were imitated by a greater than their worship--even by Milton. They make Spenser's worse; Milton makes theirs better. They imitate Spenser, faults and all; Milton glorifies their beauties. From the smaller poems of Phineas, I choose the following version of PSALM CXXX.