That daintie Rose, the daughter of her Morne, More deare then life she tendered, whose flowre The girlond of her honour did adorne: Ne suffred she the Middayes scorching powre, Ne the sharp Northerne wind thereon to showre; But lapped up her silken leaves most chayre, When so the froward skye began to lowre; But, soone as calmed was the christall ayre, She did it fayre dispred and let to florish fayre. Eternall God, in his almightie powre, To make ensample of his heavenly grace, In Paradize whylome did plant this flowre; Whence he it fetcht out of her native place, And did in stocke of earthly flesh enrace, That mortall men her glory should admyre. In gentle Ladies breste, and bounteous race Of woman kind, it fayrest Flowre doth spyre, And beareth fruit of honour and all chast desyre. Fayre ympes of beautie, whose bright shining beames Adorne the worlde with like to heavenly light, And to your willes both royalties and Reames Subdew, through conquest of your wondrous might, With this fayre flowre your goodly girlonds dight Of chastity and vertue virginall, That shall embellish more your beautie bright, And crowne your heades with heavenly coronall, Such as the Angels weare before Gods tribunall! This sense of beauty, and command of beautiful expression is not seen only in the sweetness of which both these passages are examples. Its range is wide. Spenser had in his nature besides sweetness, his full proportion of the stern and high manliness of his generation; indeed, he was not without its severity, its hardness, its unconsidering and cruel harshness, its contemptuous indifference to suffering and misery when on the wrong side. Noble and heroic ideals captivate him by their attractions. He kindles naturally and genuinely at what proves and draws out men's courage, their self-command, their self-sacrifice. He sympathizes as profoundly with the strangeness of their condition, with the sad surprises in their history and fate, as he gives himself up with little restraint to what is charming and even intoxicating in it. He can moralize with the best in terse and deep-reaching apophthegms of melancholy or even despairing experience. He can appreciate the mysterious depths and awful outlines of theology--of what our own age can see nothing in, but a dry and scholastic dogmatism. His great contemporaries were, more perhaps than the men of any age, many-sided. He shared their nature; and he used all that he had of sensitiveness and of imaginative and creative power, in bringing out its manifold aspects, and sometimes contradictory feelings and aims. Not that beauty, even varied beauty, is the uninterrupted attribute of his work. It alternates with much that no indulgence can call beautiful. It passes but too easily into what is commonplace, or forced, or unnatural, or