that poor Lamb along with her on her long quest would be an outrage. Spenser conveniently forgets the Lamb. So again we are presented to Faith and Hope in the House of Holiness. Faith

was araied all in lilly white,

And in her right hand bore a cup of gold,
With wine and water fild up to the hight,

In which a serpent did himselfe enfold,
That horrour made to all that did behold;

But she no whitt did change her constant mood:

And in her other hand she fast did hold

A booke that was both signd and scald with blood,
Wherein darke things were writt, hard to be understood.

The younger sister, Speranza, is less cumbered, yet

Upon her arme a silver anchor lay,
Whereon she leaned ever, as befell:
And ever up to heven, as she did pray,

Her stedfast eyes were bent, ne swarved other way."

These are perfectly good emblems. We can see their likes in a dozen Emblem books. But one would imagine it difficult to make a practicable character in dramatic action out of a creature so hieratically posed and burdened. To enter

Ylinked arme in arme in lovely wise,

as they are said to, with brimming cup, book, anchor and all, must have involved some power of legerdemain. In fact, Spenser drew the emblematic picture, as again of

sober Modestie

Holding her hand upon her gentle hart,32

and then, if he desired to utilize the character, just ignored the emblematic encumbrances.

I recognize that I have but scratched the surface of my problem. The chief justification of this paper might be that it should set some other student to work more efficiently in the same field. Indeed, the field itself might easily be extended to include other than visual images alone. Spenser's auditory images are very beautiful, and frequently enrich the effect of his visual imagery, as, for example, the murmuring of the stream suggested in the following landscape. Into that forest farre they thence him led, Where was their dwelling, in a pleasant glade

With mountaines rownd about environed,

And mightie woodes, which did the valley shade,
And like a stately theatre it made;

And in the midst a little river plaide

Emongst the pumy stones, which seemd to plaine

With gentle murmure that his cours they did restraine."

Often indeed the auditory image is reinforced by onomatopoeia, as when to "lull" Morpheus

Striking again is the auditory, the almost tactile, image in this single line

And many feete fast thumping th' hollow ground.

The Faerie Queene is packed with such sensuously fine effects. Perhaps he was right in setting the poet's power to express sensuous beauty above the painter's, when he speaks of

SPENSER'S SAPIENCE

BY CHARLES G. OSGOOD

In the prefatory letter to his edition of the four Platonic hymns, to Love, Beauty, Heavenly Love, and Heavenly Beauty, Spenser opposes the first pair to the second, as being immature and dangerous in their influence. "I resolved," he says, "at least to amend, and by way of retractation, to reform them, making instead of these Hymnes of earthly or naturall love and beautie, two others of heavenly and celestiall." It has been remarked' that instead of retracting or suppressing them, he gave the two dangerous hymns even wider circulation than before by publishing them, and thus ran some risk of being charged with insincerity. But one way of retracting, as he says, is to "amend" and "reform," and this he has done by rounding out in the third and fourth hymns, under the light of later spiritual experience, what, in the hymns written in youth, was necessarily incomplete, and in so far false as it was not the whole truth. The sympathetic reader finds ultimately in the four hymns neither a contradiction nor a mere philosophical or theological document, but the confession of a profoundly sensitive and serious man, revealing the course of his spiritual development. It is a progress upwards from an early and ordinary disappointment in love, to ultimate intense consciousness of eternal things, indeed to an equivalent of the Beatific Vision itself. Illustrious parallels in other lives easily suggest themselves.

The essential unity and symmetry of the four hymns is accompanied by an external symmetry. In each one the poet has rendered the abstract subject of the hymn concrete by presenting a central figure to embody the subject, and in each case exalting it to a certain degree of apotheosis. In the Hymn in Honor of Love this central figure is Cupid; in the Hymn in Honor of Beauty it is his mother, Venus; in the Hymn of Heavenly Love it is Christ; in the Hymn of Heavenly Beauty it is a female figure called Sapience. But in the last hymn there is this difference from the others, that, while in them. the central figure is before us virtually throughout, in this Sapience does not appear till the hymn is nearly two-thirds finished, and that the central figure up to this point is God himself in apotheosis. Sap

'Jefferson B. Fletcher, Spenser's 'Fowre Hymnes,' Pub. of the Modern Language Association 26. 453.

ience is then introduced as a female companion of his throne, unspeakably fair, ruling heaven and earth, giver of gifts, and adored and exalted by every creature who may catch the least glimpse of her. It is clear that the last hymn differs externally from the rest in dividing its central figure, and, in this respect at least, it abandons the symmetry consistently maintained in them.

2

Various are the interpretations of Sapience. Sometimes Spenser identifies her with the Heavenly and absolute Beauty of Plato (Phaedrus 249, 250; cf. 247), loveliest among the celestial forms surrounding Zeus. Sometimes he speaks of her as the source of this beauty. As in Plato, and in his disciples of the Renaissance, Ficino and Bruno, so in Spenser, one attains to a sight of the Heavenly Beauty through progressive appreciation of the beauty in Nature, the stars, and the angels in their orders, and this only by shaking off the corruption of sensuality and worldliness.

Spenser's implicit identification of this Heavenly Beauty with Sapience or Wisdom is regarded as Platonic by both Miss Winstanley5 and Mr. John S. Harrison. Both quote as evidence the first part of this passage from Phaedrus 250: "For sight is the keenest of our bodily senses; though not by that is wisdom (opóvnois) seen, for her loveliness would have been transporting if there had been a visible image of her, and this is true of the loveliness of the other ideas as well. But beauty only has this portion, that she is at once the loveliest and also the most apparent." But both omit the last sentence in which Plato, so far from identifying them, clearly distinguishes between Wisdom and Beauty. A more relevant passage occurs in the Symposium, p. 204: "For wisdom is a most beautiful thing, and love is of the beautiful; and therefore Love is also a philosopher or lover of wisdom." But if Plato alone is not sufficient, Ficino in his Commentary on the Symposium, quoted by Professor Fletcher (p. 461), makes the Heavenly Beauty proceed from Sapience, if he does not actually identify them. In any case these passages in Plato and Ficino are enough to have suggested such identification as Spenser made.

"H. H. B. 204, 255.

'H. H. B. 296; cf. 13.

The Foure Hymnes, ed. Lilian Winstanley, Cambridge, 1907. pp. liv; lxixlxxii; 70, 71.

'Ed. p. 24.

Platonism in English Poetry, p. 4.

Spenser's figure of Sapience has evoked various comments. No one, however, seems to have remarked that his portrait is drawn chiefly from the Hebrew personification of Wisdom found in the Book of Proverbs, Job, and the apocryphal Books of Wisdom, Sirach, and Baruch. Sapience first appears at line 182 of Spenser's hymn. She sits in the bosom of God. "The soveraine darling of the Deity," robed like a queen. So, in Prov. 8. 30, Wisdom says: "Then was I with him as a nourisher; and I was daily his delight rejoycing alway before him." Again in Wisd. 8. 3, 4: "In that she is conversant with God, it commendeth her nobilitie: yea, the Lord of all thinges loveth her. For she is the schoole-mistres of al knowledge of God, and the chooser out of his workes"; and in 9. 4, "wisedome, which sitteth by thy throne"; in 9. 10: "Send her out of thine holie heavens, and send her from the throne of thy majestie"; Sirach 24. 5: "I am come out of the mouth of the moste High.”

Sapience is adorned with gems which are "brighter then the starres" (1. 188), and which enhance her native brightness. Similarly in Wisd. 7. 29: "For she is more beautiful then the sunne, and is above all the order of the starres, and the light is not to be compared unto her," and in 7. 10: "her light cannot be quenched."

Sapience wears a crown and carries a sceptre and bears rule over all heaven and earth. In Wisd. 8. 1: "She also reacheth from one end to another mightily, and comely doth she order all thinges."

All creatures partake "of her fulnesse which the world doth fill," (1. 200). Here Spenser echoes the very phrase of his original-not a common occurrence in his poetry. Wisd. 1. 6, 7 reads: "For the spirite of wisedome is loving. . For the Spirite of the Lord filleth all the world." In Wisd. 7. 23, 24 she is "without care, having al power, circumspect in all things, and passing through all, intellectuall, pure and subtil spirites. For wisedome is nimbler then all nimble thinges: she goeth thorow and atteineth to al things: because of her purenes." So also Sirach 24. 3-7: (Geneva 6-9): “I . .. covered the earth as a cloude. My dwelling is above in the height, and my throne is in the piller of the cloude. I alone have gone round about the compasse of heaven, and have walked in the bottome of the

'I quote from the Geneva version of the Bible and the Apocrypha, which seems, in the present investigation at least, to be slightly closer to Spenser's phrase than the Bishops' Bible. An inquiry to discover which version Spenser used was promised in 1906 by W. Riedner (Spensers Belesenheit, p. v).