Of all the poets, Spenser is the most poetical. There is an originality, richness, and variety in his allegorical personages and fictions which almost vie with the splendours of the ancient mythology. His poetry is all fairyland; he paints Nature not as we find it, but as we expected to find it, and fulfils the delightful promise of our youth. His ideas, indeed, seem more distinct than his perceptions. The love of beauty, however, and not of truth, is the moving principle of his mind; and he is guided in his fantastic delineations by no rule but the impulse of an inexhaustible imagination. Some people will say that Spenser's poetry may be very fine, but that they cannot understand it, on account of the allegory. They are afraid of the allegory. This is very idle. If they do not meddle with the allegory, the allegory will not meddle with them. Without minding it at all, the whole is as plain as a pikestaff. Spenser is the poet of our waking dreams, and he has invented not only a language, but a music of his own for them. The undulations are infinite, like those of the waves of the sea; but the effect is still the same, lulling the senses into a deep oblivion of the jarring noises of the world, from which we have no wish ever to be recalled. _Shakespeare and Milton_ Those arts which depend on individual genius and incommunicable power have always leaped at once from infancy to manhood, from the first rude dawn of invention to their meridian height and dazzling lustre, and have in general declined ever after. Homer, Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare, Dante, and Ariosto--Milton alone was of a later age, and not the worse for it--Raphael, Titian, Michael Angelo, Correggio, Cervantes, and Boccaccio, the Greek sculptors and tragedians, all lived near the beginning of their arts, perfected, and all but created them. They rose by clusters, never so to rise again. The four greatest names in English poetry are almost the four first we come to--Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare, and Milton. There are no others that can really be put into competition with these. Of these four, Chaucer excels as the poet of manners, or of real life; Spenser as the poet of romance; Shakespeare as the poet of Nature, in the largest use of the term; and Milton as the poet of morality. Chaucer describes things as they are; Spenser, as we wish them to be; Shakespeare, as they would be; and Milton, as they ought to be. The characteristic of Chaucer is intensity; of Spenser, remoteness; of Milton, elevation; of Shakespeare, everything.