It is noteworthy that it had no literary manifestation there till two centuries after the time of its passage.

Hawthorne's novels are the fruit--the one ripe fruit in art--of the Puritan imagination.
(2) If the reader adopts the seventeenth century habit himself and takes stock of what the Elizabethans accomplished in poetry, he will recognize speedily that their work reached various stages of completeness.

They perfected the poetic drama and its instrument, blank verse; they perfected, though not in the severer Italian form, the sonnet; they wrote with extraordinary delicacy and finish short lyrics in which a simple and freer manner drawn from the classics took the place of the mediaeval intricacies of the ballad and the rondeau.

And in the forms which they failed to bring to perfection they did beautiful and noble work.

The splendour of _The Fairy Queen_ is in separate passages; as a whole it is over tortuous and slow; its affectations, its sensuousness, the mere difficulty of reading it, makes us feel it a collection of great passages, strung it is true on a large conception, rather than a great work.