On a momentous day for Keats, Cowden Clarke introduced him for the first time to Spenser, reading him the _Epithalamion_ in the afternoon and at his own eager request lending him the _Faerie Queene_ to take away the same evening. With Spenser's later imitators, playful or serious, as Shenstone and Thomson, Beattie and the more recent Mrs Tighe, Keats, we know, was already familiar; indeed he owned later to a passing phase of boyish delight in Beattie's _Minstrel_ and Tighe's languorously romantic _Psyche_. But now he found himself taken to the fountain head, and was enraptured. It has been said, and truly, that no one who has not had the good fortune to be attracted to the _Faerie Queene_ in boyhood can ever quite wholeheartedly and to the full enjoy it. The maturer student, appreciate as he may its innumerable beauties and noble ethical temper, can hardly fail to be critically conscious also of its arbitrary forms of rime and language, and sated by its melodious redundance: he will perceive its faults now of scholastic pedantry and now of flagging inspiration, the perplexity and discontinuousness of the allegory, and the absence of real and breathing humanity amidst all that luxuriance of symbolic and decorative invention, and prodigality of romantic incident and detail. It is otherwise with the greedy and indiscriminate imaginative appetite of boyhood. I speak as one of the fortunate who know by experience that for a boy there is no poetical revelation like the _Faerie Queene_, no pleasure equal to the pleasure of being rapt for the first time along that ever-buoyant stream of verse, by those rivers and forests of enchantment, glades and wildernesses alive with glancing figures of knight and lady, oppressor and champion, mage and Saracen,--with masque and combat, pursuit and rescue, the chivalrous shapes and hazards of the woodland, and beauty triumphant or in distress. Through the new world thus opened to him Keats went ranging with delight: 'ramping' is Cowden Clarke's word: he showed moreover his own instinct for the poetical art by fastening with critical enthusiasm on epithets of special felicity or power. For instance, says his friend, 'he hoisted himself up, and looked burly and dominant, as he said, "What an image that is--_sea-shouldering whales_!"'