1

THE CAVE OF DESPAIRE.

"Ere long they come, where that same wicked wight

His dwelling has, low in an hollow cave,
Far underneath a craggy clift ypight,
Dark, doleful, dreary, like a greedy grave,
That still for carion carcasses doth crave:
On top whereof ay dwelt the ghastly owl,
Shrieking his baneful note, which ever drave
Far from that haunt all other cheerful fowl:
And all about it wand'ring ghosts did wail and howl.

And, all about, old stocks and stubs of trees,
Whereon nor fruit nor leaf was ever seen,
Did hang upon the ragged rocky knees;
On which had many wretches hanged been,
Whose carcasses were scatter'd on the green,
And thrown about the clifts. Arrived there,
That bare-head knight, for dread and doleful teen,
Would fain have fled, ne durst approachen near:
But th' other forc'd him stay, and comforted in fear.

The darksome cave they enter, where they find
That cursed man, now sitting on the ground,
Musing full sadly in his sullen mind;

His greasy locks, long growing and unbound,
Disordered hung about his shoulders round,
And hid his face: thro' which his hollow eyne
Look'd deadly dull, and stared astound;

His raw-bone cheeks, through penury and pine,
Were shrunk into his jaws, as he did never dine.

His garment nought but many ragged clouts,
With thorns together pinn'd and patched was,
The which his naked sides he wrapp'd abouts:
And him beside there lay upon the grass
A dreary corse, whose life away did pass,
All wallow'd in his own yet lukewarm blood,

That from his wound yet welled fresh, alas!

In which a rusty knife fast fixed stood,

And made an open passage for the gushing flood.

IN Spenser's admirable poem of the Faerie Queene, in which the nature and progress of the virtues that lead human nature to its highest excellence are represented under beautiful, though, in some respects, dry and tedious allegories, there is no description more masterly than that of the Cave of Despaire. The Poet exhibits an inexhaustible fertility of invention, and a justness and an animation in describing what he invents, that none but a truly great genius could be capable of. A deprivation of all hope, a horror and loathing of existence, bows the " man of hell" to the ground,

and leads him to

"Swords, ropes, poison, fire,

And all that might him to perdition draw."

Nothing is wanting to complete the picture of Despaire in its most direful effects. The boding and ghastly owl," the "wailing and wandering ghosts,"

66

"The dreary corse

Wallowing in his own yet lukewarm blood,"

the old stocks and stubs of trees" that " hang upon the ragged rock," and the self-murdered wretches that are suspended from it, exhibit, in the Cave of Despaire, such a region of dismay and death, that, together with the delusive arguments of Despaire exciting to self-murder, and the awful painting he displays of

-“ Damned ghosts that doe in torment waile,

And thousand fiends that doe them endlesse pain,"

work so deadly an effect on even Holiness itself, personified by the Red Crosse Knight, as to urge him to lift up his hand against his own life; which fatal purpose is prevented by Una, or Truth. All this rueful spectacle, so sublimely imagined and described by the Poet, the Painter has delineated with an energy that Spenser himself, we might venture to say, would have pourtrayed, had he wielded the pencil as well as the pen.

Mr. West has exhibited the terror of "the bare head Knight," who had before been nearly tempted by Despaire to destroy himself, with an expression the most natural and lively, while he shrinks behind his companion and his shield to screen himself from the view and audience of the death-seducing and "grisly terror." The shield of the Red Crosse Knight-The shield of Faith—is as judiciously represented fallen from his arm; and the heads of the animals that carry Una and the Knight, crouched, as if even beasts partook of the terror of the scene. The terror consequent on Despaire is thus carried to the highest possible extent of the Painter's as well as Poet's delineation.

R. H.