Through me men go into the blissful place Of the heart’s heal, and deadly woundes cure; Through me men go into the welle of Grace, Where green and lusty May shall ever endure. This is the way to all good aventure; Be glad thou reader, and thy sorrow offcast. All open am I, pass in, and hye thee fast. LECTURE VI SPENSER (_Friday Evening, January 26, 1855_) VI Chaucer had been in his grave one hundred and fifty years before England had secreted choice material enough to produce another great poet. Or, perhaps, we take it for granted that Nature understands her own business too well to make such productions cheap. Beauty, we know, has no charm like that of its eternal unexpectedness, and the best delight is that which blossoms from a stem of bare and long days. Or is it that the spirit of man, of every race of men, has its fatal ebbs and floods, its oscillations between the fluid ideal and the solid matter-of-fact, so that the doubtful line of shore between is in one generation a hard sandy actuality, with only such resemblances of beauty as a dead sea-moss here and there, and in the next is whelmed with those graceful curves of ever-gaining, ever-receding foam, and that dance of joyous spray which knows not, so bright is it, whether it be sea or sunshine. What English Poetry was between Chaucer and Spenser there is no need to say. Scotland had given birth to two or three poets of that kind which is qualified by the epithet _national_, which is as much as saying that they took account only of the universe to the north-northeast corner of human nature instead of the whole circumference of it. England in the meanwhile had been enriched with Sternhold and Hopkins, but on the whole, the most important event between the death of Chaucer and the publication of the “Faëry Queene” was the introduction of blank verse. Perhaps the blank poetry suggested it. Before the “Faëry Queene,” also, two long poems were printed and popular--the “Mirror for Magistrates,” and “Albion’s England.” How the first of these was ever read it is hard to conceive, unless we accept the theory of some theologians that our earth is only a kind of penal colony where men are punished for sins committed in some previous state of existence. The other was the work of one Warner, a conveyancer, and has a certain philological value now from its abounding in the popular phrases of the day. It is worth notice, also, as containing the most perfect example in the English language of what is called a conceit. It occurs in his account of Queen Elinor’s treatment of Fair Rosamond: With that she dashed her on the lips So dyed double red; Hard was the heart that struck the blow, Soft were the lips that bled.