And to read him puts one in the condition of reverie--a state of mind in which one’s thoughts and feelings float motionless as you may see fishes do in a swift brook, only vibrating their fins enough to keep themselves from being swept down the current, while their bodies yield to all its curvings and quiver with the thrills of its fluid and sinuous delight. It is a luxury beyond luxury itself, for it is not only dreaming awake, but dreaming without the trouble of doing it yourself; letting it be done for you, in truth, by the finest dreamer that ever lived, who has the art of giving you all his own visions through the medium of music. Of the versification of Spenser we need attempt no higher praise than that it belonged to him. If we would feel the infinite variety of the Spenserian stanza, as Spenser uses it, its musical intricacies, its long, sliding cadences, smooth as the green slope on the edge of Niagara, we have only to read verses of the same measure by other poets. As showing his pathos, Mr. Lowell read Una’s lament on her desertion by the Red Cross Knight, and other pieces, calling attention particularly to the fact that his females were not women, like those of Shakspeare, but ideal beings. We are accustomed to apologize for the grossness of our favorite old authors by saying that their age was to blame, and not they. Spenser needs no such excuses. He is the most perfect gentleman among poets. Through that unrefined time, when ladies drank a quart of ale for breakfast, and even Hamlet can say a coarse thing to Ophelia, Spenser passes pure and chaste as another Sir Galahad. Whoever can endure unmixed delight, whoever can tolerate music, and painting, and poetry, all in one, whoever wishes to be rid of thought and to let the busy anvils of the brain be silent for a time, let him read in the “Faëry Queene.” There is a land of pure Heart’s Ease where no ache or sorrow of spirit can enter. If there be any poet whom we can love and feel grateful toward, it is Edmund Spenser. LECTURE VII MILTON (_Tuesday Evening, January 30, 1855_) VII Between Spenser and Milton occurred the most truly imaginative period of English poetry. It is the time of Shakspeare and of the other dramatists only less than he. It seems to have been the moment in which the English mind culminated. Even if we subtract Shakspeare, the age remains without a parallel. The English nature was just then giving a great heave and yearn toward freedom in politics and religion, and literature could not fail to partake of the movement.