a stubborn passage, but striving never to polish the dullest lines nor
to strengthen the weakest.

A reader who will observe the difficult rhyming scheme, a scheme that
calls for six words of one rhyme and four of another, will understand
the presence of forced lines, an intrusion that one must needs suffer
in even "The Faerie Queene." These padded lines are a serious blemish
to the poem, but the introduction of naïve and familiar expressions is
one of its charms, as when the Pearl, protesting like Piccarda in
Paradise[1] that among beatified spirits there can be no rivalry,
exclaims: "The more the merrier."[2]

The translation may, at many points, need apology, but the original
needs only explanation. Readers familiar with mediæval poetry expect
to encounter moral platitudes and theological subtlety. Dogma takes
large and vital place in the sublimest cantos of Dante's "Paradise,"
and the English poet is consciously following his noblest master when
he puts a sermon into the lips of his "little queen." To modern ears
such exposition is at harsh discord with the simple human grief and
longing of the poet, but to the mediaevalist symbolic theology was a
passion. Precisely in the moment when she begins a discourse
concerning the doctrine of redemption, Beatrice turns upon Dante "eyes
that might make a man happy in the fire," and at its close he looks
upon her and beholds her "grow more beautiful."[3] If even Beatrice
has been considered mere personification, it is natural that the Pearl
should be so regarded, but the plain reader finds in the symbolic
maiden of the English poem, as in the transfigured lady of the
Italian, some record of a human being whose loss was anguish, and
whose presence rapture, to a poet long ago.